Hbo, Tv Ratings | featured news

Beyoncé Knowles’ autobiographical documentary that premiered last Saturday was the largest audience for an HBO doc since Nielsen amended its method of measuring ratings in 2004, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Sunday’s second-season finale of HBO’s “Game of Thrones” clocked 4.2 million viewers at 9 p.m.  – 1.2 million ahead of the first-season finale crowd of 3 mil. At 4.2 million, the “GoT” episode’s 9 p.m. telecast was on par in the hour with ABC’s “Extreme Makeover: Weight Loss Edition” (4.3 million), CBS’s “The Good Wife” rerun (4.6 million), and ahead of Fox’s repeats of “Family Guy” and “American Dad” (3.6 million), while running behind NBC’s “Miss USA Pageant (5.8 million).

After 18 months of waiting, an average of 3.5 million people tuned in Sunday to watch “Mad Men’s” fifth-season debut. That’s a series best for the show — and about 600,000 more people than watched the fourth-season debut in July 2010. “Mad Men” had been off the air since October 2010, following the fourth-season finale, as the studio, the network and the creator wrangled over this and that — product placement within the show, adding another ad break, creator’s salary, blah, blah, blah.

Sarah Palin can still pack them in. Even when someone else is playing her. HBO’s “Game Change,” a chronicle -- from the team behind HBO's "Recount" -- of the former Alaska governor’s candidacy for the vice presidency nearly four years ago, drew 2.1 million viewers in its initial run Saturday, making it the highest-rated HBO original film in nearly eight years.