After the Game of Thrones prequel premiered last month, HBO has since renewed the show for a second season following a record-setting premiere. This all but alleviated any concerns that House of the Dragon would suffer from the backlash resulting from the highly divisive final season of Game of Thrones. Now, it appears that House of the Dragon is turning a lot of naysayers into believers and effectively guaranteeing that we’ll be seeing more shows set in Westeros in the future. According to various reports, House of the Dragon is averaging 29 million viewers over the course of its first half. To put these numbers into context, it’s triple the 9.3 million average viewers for the debut season of Game of Thrones a decade ago. Furthermore, it took until the seventh season of Game of Thrones to post higher numbers (32.8 million). Although 29 million isn’t enough to match the 46 million that Game of Thrones enjoyed in its final season, it’s still a substantial amount of people who are tuning into House of the Dragon. The more interesting part is that House of the Dragon continues to see a marked increase in viewership. We wouldn’t be surprised if House of the Dragon Season 1 ends with an average of 30 million viewers per episode. Having said that, we’re curious to find out what HBO is plotting for House of the Dragon. We have heard rumors that HBO wants to turn the show into an anthology that will see the future seasons set to explore the incestuous family in other centuries. Fingers crossed, we’ll see the events leading up to the conquest of Aegon I Targaryen as well as the downfall of the House Targaryen at the hands of Robert Baratheon. But, if not, House of the Dragon has proven that we can trust HBO once again. With George R.R. Martin confirming that he is heavily involved in all Game of Thrones spin-offs, the Jon Snow-led show should be quite interesting, to say the least. For now, it’s best we focus on the five remaining episodes of House of the Dragon Season 1. The highly anticipated casting change will likely take some time to get used to, so it’ll be most interesting to see how viewers will react and if there’ll be a marked dip in the numbers for Episode 6 and beyond.
