(NEW YORK) — Looks like there were plenty of people who were dying to know if Jon Snow was really dead.
Sunday night’s premiere of the sixth episode of Game of Thrones pulled just shy of eight million viewers, according to Nielsen estimates reported by Variety. That makes it the third-most-watched episode of the HBO medieval fantasy drama…for now. When HBO Now’s record streaming numbers from Sunday are added to the total, it’s quite likely that this Game of Thrones episode, titled “The Red Woman,” will be the most-watched ever.
Helping to drive the huge tune-in might be the fact the episode was the first to be officially “off book,” meaning its storyline wasn’t adapted from any of author George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books, on which Game of Thrones is based. As a result, no one — not even fans who’ve read the entire series — knew what to expect.
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