The Last of Us television series is coming to an end with its first season.
Despite competing with the Oscars, the last episode of the first season of The Last of Us was watched by 8.2 million viewers on HBO. This is the highest audience recorded by Naughty Dog (Sony Interactive Entertainment/PlayStation Studios) game adaptation in the series.
Salt Lake City in spring. #TheLastOfUs pic.twitter.com/KSBrTnEES7
— The Last of Us (@TheLastofUsHBO) March 13, 2023
The 8.2 million viewers of the “final season”is a 74.5% increase from the 4.7 million viewers who watched the series, which debuted last January. The vast majority of viewers watch the series on HBO Max. With the exception of Sunday’s Super Bowl episode (which aired two days earlier), only about 12% of viewers on the first night (846,000 out of 6.84 million through episode eight) watched the series at 9:00 p.m. on HBO’s main cable channel. On-air replays and DVR playback are also a fraction of the total, but most viewers are watching HBO Max.
Viewers of episodes of the first season of The Last of Us
- Episode 1: 4.7 million
- Episode 2: 5.7 million
- Episode 3: 6.4 million
- Episode 4: 7.5 million
- Episode 5: 11.6 million (including data collected over three days of broadcast)
- Episode 6: 7.8 million
- Episode 7: 7.7 million
- Episode 8: 8.1 million
- Episode 9: 8.2 million
The Last of Us is better than Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon
HBO reports that the average audience for the first six episodes of The Last of Us currently stands at about 30.4 million viewers across all platforms, with the first episode attracting nearly 40 million viewers. That last number, if it holds over time or continues to rise, would mean The Last of Us is bigger than House of the Dragon, which averaged 29 million viewers across all platforms in late summer and fall 2022. The Last of Us’ audience of 30.4 million viewers is the largest for an HBO series since the final season of Game of Thrones, which averaged over 44 million viewers in 2019 (season seven in 2017 averaged 32.