HBO Touts ‘The Undoing’ as First Original Series to Grow Ratings Each Week

Tyler Hersko
·2 min read

“The Undoing” finale was the television event of the year so far for HBO. The premium cabler’s parent company announced the show’s Nov. 29 finale drew the biggest audience for an HBO series since July 2019.

WarnerMedia stated that “The Undoing” finale garnered 3 million viewers across all platforms, which makes the show the most-watched night of viewing for an original series on HBO since “Big Little Lies” aired its finale in 2019. “The Undoing,” which starred Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant, has also been a weekly ratings success for the premium cabler; total viewing increased 43 percent from last week and more than doubled premiere night numbers, while linear performance was up 42 percent from last week and up 168 percent from the series premiere, according to WarnerMedia. It was HBO’s first original series to grow its audience each week, the company said.

WarnerMedia also said that “The Undoing” also enjoyed viewership success on HBO Max. Viewership of “The Undoing” season finale increased more than 80 percent from last week’s debut night and was nearly five times higher than its series debut night on HBO Max. WarnerMedia did not provide specific streaming viewership data for the

The six-part miniseries, which was directed by Susanne Bier and created and written for television by David E. Kelley, follows Grace (Kidman) and Jonathan Fraser (Grant) who are living the only lives they ever wanted for themselves. Overnight a chasm opens in their lives: a violent death and a chain of terrible revelations. Left behind in the wake of a spreading and very public disaster and horrified by the ways in which she has failed to heed her own advice, Grace must dismantle one life and create another for her child and her family.

Though “The Undoing” pulled in strong viewership numbers for HBO and received generally sympathetic reviews from most critics, IndieWire’s Ben Travers was more critical of the series in his grade D review of the show in October, where he referred to “The Undoing” as a “pity party for the 1 percent.”

In other WarnerMedia news, the company also announced that the Kaley Cuoco-led “The Flight Attendant” has enjoyed a larger debut audience than all of HBO Max’s other originals to date, although it did not provide specific viewership numbers.

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