HBO’s heavily marketed series Euphoria didn’t bring big returns Sunday for its US on-air premiere, but its digital numbers were fairly solid, reports The Hollywood Reporter.
Big Little Lies, meanwhile, grew in its second week on HBO in the US.
In Australia, the second episode of Big Little Lies was the second-most watched show on the Foxtel platform on Monday. The HBO drama is also working well for audiences watching on their own terms.
Big Little Lies is the only Foxtel program in the top 10 BVOD programs on Tuesday, ranking higher than The Handmaid’s Tale, Have You Been Paying Attention? and Home And Away.
The controversial Euphoria, which stars Zendaya and features teenage characters (played by young-adult actors) heavily engaged in drugs and sex, drew a modest US 577,000 viewers for its on-air premiere. Streaming on HBO Go and HBO Now helped significantly, pushing the show’s first-night US total to a little under 1 million viewers (a gain of 70%).
The series is the first HBO original to focus primarily on high school-age characters, so it’s perhaps not a surprise that a large chunk of Euphoria’s audience is watching on digital platforms that tend to have younger users. HBO says the audience on HBO Now was the largest for a series premiere since Westworld in 2016.