After Sunday’s Season 2 finale, HBO will freeze all “Westworld” functions for at least a year — but did the drama’s sophomore run finish better than it began?
This past weekend, Episode 210 earned 1.6 million linear viewers, according to Nielsen, which is down 24 percent in total eyeballs from its debut this spring. HBO added another 600,000 viewers via an encore and its HBO Go and Now streams, per the pay-TV channel, bringing the nightly total up to 2.2 million.
“Westworld” Season 2 premiered back in April to 2.1 million linear viewers, per Nielsen, which was actually 100,000 audience members slimmer than the show’s Season 1 finale. Counting an encore as well as HBO Go and Now streams, that night’s sum grew to 3 million overall viewers.
“Westworld” sees a lot of delayed viewing. Last season, the TV reimagining of the 1973 feature film saw nearly 80 percent of its viewers tune in post-premiere night, according to HBO. The premium cabler is expecting a Season 2 average of around 10 million viewers once all data has come in.
Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s HBO sci-fi series closed its sophomore run with a feature-length finale, titled “The Passenger,” which answered many a question we’d been pondering throughout the sophomore year of, but left viewers with a whole new mess of head-scratchers, like that Bernard (Jeffrey Wright)/Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood)/Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) murder-resurrection triangle; Ford’s (Anthony Hopkins) final fate; Maeve (Thandie Newton) and the other dead Hosts’ chances of being revived; the “real world” setting we’re entering in Season 3; and what in the heck was going on with the Man in Black/William (Ed Harris) in that unexpected post-credits scene.
You can read our full interview with Joy about the Season 2 finale here. And everything we currently know about Season 3 here.