How Many People Watched The Rings of Power’s Season 2 Debut is Shocking Compared to Season 1

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power was topping the Prime Video chart even before the debut of its second season’s premiere. However, new information revealed by Samba TV (via Deadline) has suggested that the Tolkien fantasy’s return has been nowhere near as epic as its original Season 1 debut.

While Amazon has not yet revealed any official details about the viewership of The Rings of Power’s second season, Samba TV has become one of the best indicators of how a series is performing over its first few days on release. Based on their sample of 3 million households, the data released by the company has revealed that The Rings of Power was watched by 902,000 households in the U.S. across the first four days on Prime Video.

While this seems like a reasonably strong number, when given some context, it is around half the 1.8 million that tuned into Season 1’s debut episode across just three days back in 2022. Samba TV does not incorporate any data from those viewing on mobile devices, but the like-for-like data samples are enough to suggest that the series’ return has not been the must-watch event of its predecessor. With streaming platforms being unwilling to share much data about their shows and viewer numbers, it is likely that Nielsen’s streaming chart release in a few weeks will be the next time we see how the two seasons of The Rings of Power compare.

Is The Rings of Power Losing Audience Interest Already?

Without a complete picture of viewer numbers, there is a lot of guesswork involved in working out whether the series has really dropped half of its audience season on season. Prior to the release of Season 2’s first three episodes, The Rings of Power shot to the top of Prime Video’s global chart, suggesting that there were many people returning to rewatch Season 1 before diving straight into the new episodes. However, if this is the case, there seems to be a lot of people who have not yet made it to Season 2.

Of course, Season 1 of The Rings of Power was a very different beast to its successor. There was a huge buzz around the arrival of the show’s debut episode in 2022, both from those eagerly awaiting this new expansion to the work of Tolkien on screen, and those who wanted nothing more than to criticize what they saw. Extreme levels of review bombing seen around the show two years ago drove huge numbers of subscribers to watch the series in the wake of the torrent of abuse the series received on sites like Rotten Tomatoes.

Season 2 has not had the same amount of publicity swirling around its arrival, and the reviews have improved a lot for this season, removing the air of controversy that followed the initial episodes. While all is still not rosy in the gardens of Middle Earth as far as some die-hard Tolkien fans are concerned, the series is certainly not a failure in any way. Viewership is still above anything else on Prime Video, critics continue to heap praise on the lavish series, and even audiences have been much more impressed with Season 2 to boot. All in all, The Rings of Power continues to make its mark in the streaming world, and with three more seasons reportedly planned to tell the story it set out to tell, it seems like the series is currently one of the safest bets to avoid cancelation of any streaming show.