‘Succession’ Viewership Hits Another Series High, Helping ‘Barry’ Season 4 to Biggest Audience Since 2019

For the second week in a row, Succession reached its biggest audience yet.

The HBO drama reached 2.6 million viewers on Sunday night, when the fourth episode of its fourth and final season debuted. Thats an improvement of 4% from Episode 3, which featured a major character death and brought in a then-series high of 2.5 million viewers.

Immediately afterwards, HBO and HBO Max premiered the fourth and final season of Barry with two episodes. The first episode was watched by 710,000 viewers the most the series has seen since the finale of Season 2, which benefited from airing directly after an episode of Game of Thrones, HBOs most watched show ever. Episode 2 dropped by 23% to bring in 550,000 viewers.

Provided by Warner Bros. Discovery, these figures represent a combination of third-party data from Nielsen regarding viewership of both shows on HBOs cable channel and WBDs own data regarding streams on HBO Max.

Speaking to Variety, Succession star Jeremy Strong said that Logan Roys (Brian Cox) shocking death in Episode 3 went through [his] heart, pointing out the suddenness of it, the banality of it, the ordinariness of the way these things play out, the inability to have the moment be what you want it to be.

Barry Season 4 picks up where Season 3 left off, seeing Barry (series creator Bill Hader) finally go to prison for the murder of Janice Moss (Paul Newsome) after being set up by Mr. Cousineau (Henry Winkler) and Jim Moss (Robert Wisdom). He doesnt understand what he did wrong, Hader said in an interview with Variety. Its kind of like your dad just turned you in to the police. Hes in a lot of denial throughout the season, and then as the two people he really holds onto Cousineau and Sally [Sarah Goldberg] ostracize him, he becomes a feral animal. He gets really angry. It spins out, and hes just left with himself.