UPDATE: Noting that premiere telecasts account for an increasingly smaller percentage of total viewers for HBO series, a network representative told CBR that, accounting for catch-up viewers across all platforms, Watchmen's total audience has grown to more than 8 million. According to HBO, Watchmen was among the most-watched series last year, and was premium cable's most-watched new series.

HBO’s Watchmen seemed like a massive hit. Everywhere you looked, there were podcasts and articles breathlessly going through every detail of the show, trying to figure out where the story was going to go, how it connected to the comics and every little detail hidden in the background and backstory. Watchmen had the internet captivated with its every episode, it seemed.

Except that was a bit of an illusion. While it was a big hit among the nerd audience, that didn’t translate to the massive success that HBO was hoping it would be. Looking at the actual viewership numbers and comparing that to other HBO successes, it’s actually pretty clear that Watchmen was a niche show: big with the geekier audience, but not registering outside of that.

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The most obvious, comparable ratings to look at are from Game of Thrones and Westworld. For both of these, the numbers are taken from the shows’ first seasons, the only fair way to compare them since later seasons had the hype of the prior seasons to help boost the ratings. For some fun, let’s also throw in Big Little Lies, which isn’t the same genre, but went from a planned miniseries to bringing it back for a second season. Here's how their ratings compare to Watchmen.

Average Live and Same Day Viewers per Episode:

  • Watchmen Season 1: 0.759 million
  • Big Little Lies Season 1: 1.17 million
  • Westworld Season 1: 1.82 million
  • Game of Thrones Season 1: 2.52 million

The same general trend holds across other ratings measurements: Watchmen was behind each of those shows in the ratings by a fair margin. If you look at Watchmen’s average by episode, it is going up by the end, but the same also applied to all of these shows. The viewer numbers simply weren’t there for as much online buzz as there was about the show.

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That’s not a criticism of Watchmen or an endorsement of the other three shows. It’s simply how many people were watching it compared to the others, and the numbers weren’t that high compared to other high profile show launches on HBO in recent memory. This may also have been a factor in why HBO decided not to renew the show for a second season. They could have broken from the intended 9-episode mini-series, but Damon Lindelof has been iffy on it, and the viewer numbers didn’t come back that high. Given that, it may not have made sense to actually bring it back.

What it lacked in viewer numbers, Watchmen seems to make up it for in cultural impact, even affecting the history curriculum in Oklahoma schools. It had a big impact on the people who saw it. Watchmen will be there for anyone discovering it years later who didn’t catch it the first time through.

Developed by Damon Lindelof, Watchmen stars Jeremy Irons, Regina King, Don Johnson, Tim Blake Nelson, Jean Smart, Louis Gossett Jr., Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Tom Mison, James Wolk, Adelaide Clemens, Andrew Howard, Frances Fisher, Jacob Ming-Trent, Sara Vickers, Dylan Schombing, Lily Rose Smith and Adelynn Spoon.

Next: HBO’s Watchmen Did What It Promised: It Told a Complete, Satisfying Story