Game of Thrones’ “The Long Night” has highest ratings yet for final season

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

After years and years of teasing the clash between the living and the Night King’s undead army, the battle to end all battles took place during last Sunday’s episode, “The Long Night”, and every GAME OF THRONES fan was there to witness it. The first rating reports have hit the web, and the data reveals the episode had the highest turnout ever for any GOT episode in its entire run, with 17.8 million viewers tuning in across all platforms to watch dragons lay waste to zombie hordes and for the bodies to pile up in Winterfell.

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At 12.02 million viewers from the linear channel, the longest episode of the series (clocking in at 82 minutes) had 2 million more initial viewers than the previous episode “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” (10 million viewers) and a few hundred thousand more than the season opener “Winterfell’ (11.8 million viewers) during their initial viewings. With the ratings from streaming services like HBO NOW and HBO GO accounted for, it topped the first episode of the series, which amassed 17.4 million viewers across all platforms. As of now, that first episode has received a whopping 38 million views thanks to repeat viewings (per Variety).

The impressive viewership of “The Long Night” comes a very, very near second place for the series in terms of initial views, coming in below the 12.07 million linear viewers for the season seven finale, “The Dragon and the Wolf.” While that episode teased a coming together of virtually every main character as they decide how to deal with the Army of the Dead, this episode found most of those same characters taking on the zombie horde with young Arya (Maisie Williams) taking down the Night King once and for all, and the dead with him.

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Per Variety, the episode did manage to break another impressive record, becoming the most tweeted-about TV episode of all time with 7.8 million tweets posted about the episode. Taking from what I saw on my own feed, most of these episodes related to Arya being a general badass, and Bran once again stealing some moments with his low-key weirdness, especially warging with some crows/ravens while the biggest battle of all time played out around him.

While the episode drew mixed responses for a litany of reasons it nonetheless lived up to expectations of being epic in scale and endlessly chaotic. The dead came out in full force, some major players said goodbye, and the Night King's demise came from the perfect hands. From now on out it should be mostly that classic GOT drama we all love, with only three episodes remaining.

GAME OF THRONES continues this Sunday.