Popularity of ‘Heated Rivalry’ Has Surprised Even TV Executives

During its debut week on HBO Max, “Heated Rivalry” accumulated roughly 30 million streaming minutes, a figure that failed to qualify among the 50 most-watched streaming original programs, according to Luminate, a research group. By the week of Dec. 26, when the season’s sixth and final episode was released, time spent streaming the show was up more than tenfold, eclipsing 324 million minutes, Luminate said….

It did not cost HBO Max much, either. The company paid only about $600,000 per episode to license it in the United States…

Over time, the demographics of the audience have changed. On Dec. 22, four days before the finale streamed, 53 percent of the show’s viewers were female, an HBO spokesman said. By the end of last week, roughly two-thirds of the viewers were women…

Mr. Bloys said that HBO Max would continue to license the show but that all creative decisions would belong to Mr. Tierney and Crave. “They clearly know what they’re doing,” he said….

Both actors will be presenters at the Golden Globes on Sunday night in Beverly Hills, Calif. Then Mr. Storrie will fly cross-country to appear on Seth Meyers’s late-night show on NBC on Monday. Given the unexpected crowd for Mr. Williams’s appearance on “The Tonight Show,” NBCUniversal is preparing to greatly increase security around 30 Rockefeller Plaza on Monday.

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The article also mentioned that Netflix is usually better at getting unknown shows into the zeitgeist like "baby reindeer" so this is a new thing for HBO: