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Ted Linhart's avatar

That 26.7M is an AVERAGE of the cumulative viewing to each episode from S1 that occurred in 2025, not a sum of all the episodes. So if each of the 15 episodes of S1 had exactly the same number of viewers than 26.7M people watched each episode 2025 and hence they average to 26.7M. Of course in truth some episodes had less than 26.7M and some had more but they average out to 26.7M

That sum methodology is really used for the hours viewed stat which I don't like because then the # of episodes drives the result and you cannot judge the shows fairly.

AlexN's avatar

An interesting note: Variety reports HBO says Heated Rivalry is averaging 10.8 million US viewers per episode. https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/heated-rivalry-ratings-viewers-1236657375/

I'm not sure how that translates into your charts. A lot of later viewership?

Ted Linhart's avatar

Yeah I saw that number and I feel like there is something at play here that is making the number bigger than what the industry would normally report without spin. I don't see that number or anything near it in the sources I use . Also this article says "reach" which in TV research world is a different metric than is the norm. That refers to how many unique people watched the show even just once - not the average audience at any time which is the common metric and what I use. I feel like if I sat with the HBO Max team that ran the data I would see something that is technically accurate but not the usual reporting metric. I realize HBO Max has more accurate data than syndicated services but they are not usually this far off.

Zane Silk's avatar

How do the viewership numbers for The Pitt S1 eps provided here stack up with the total 2025 views of 26.7 million listed in your "10 Things We Learned About TV In 2025" article? Per the second table in this article, the cumulative viewership for eps 1-15 is 60 million, and that's only for the first 7 days for each ep.