I sat down to watch it, then realized during the recap that I'd bailed 3 episodes into season 2. I might go back... Might not bother. It's GOT without the characters that made GOT worth watching.

The season three premiere episode is the second season episode nine that was taken from us.

For those out of the loop season 2 was written as ten episodes, as most "Game of Thrones" seasons are. It was cut down to eight episodes and the writers strike prevented rewrites. The biggest episode of a given season of "Game of Thrones" is episode nine.

So we got an eight episode build up and then blue balled for two years. Now that we've got the episode, it was great. It has some issues since it has to pull double duty as a recap episode and a finale episode, but it's largely excellent.

Assuming they've paced thus season well I would expect to get viewers to return, but HBO shot themselves in the foot, but hopefully not too badly.

The Season 3 premiere had attracted 21.5M global viewers in the first three days across HBO and HBO Max, Warner Bros. Discovery said Thursday.

That’s down about 8% from Season 2’s 23.4M viewers in three days, but it’s still a strong enough audience retention for the season debut. A decline was somewhat expected given that the show (as many do) also lost viewers between Seasons 1 and 2 .

That difference is not significant.