“The White Lotus” and “Succession” have a lot in common.
Both HBO shows skewer the rich and premiered to low expectations before catching fire, delighting viewers, critics, Emmy voters and anyone capable of creating and packaging a meme. The creators of both shows — Mike White with “The White Lotus” and Jesse Armstrong with “Succession” — are hailed as bona fide auteurs because of the success.
But there’s one significant difference between them: “The White Lotus” has developed a much bigger audience.
The third season, which concludes Sunday night, is the series’s most popular yet, according to internal HBO statistics and Nielsen, the research firm. The final viewership totals for the season appear poised to catapult “The White Lotus” into the upper tier of HBO’s most popular shows.
Here’s some context. The first season of “The White Lotus,” which premiered in July 2021, had an audience of about nine million in the United States, according to HBO’s stats, which include viewership on cable television and the company’s streaming service, now called Max. That was roughly the same size as the audience for the fourth and final season of “Succession,” which wrapped up in May 2023.
The second season of “The White Lotus,” which debuted in October 2022, shot up to more than 15 million viewers, and this season is on track to have at least 18 million, an HBO spokesman said. Depending on how many more viewers catch up on the final episodes, that figure could grow closer to 20 million.
That would be in line with the second season of “Euphoria,” the HBO hit that earned over 19 million viewers when it premiered in January 2022. (The third season of “Euphoria,” now in production, is likely to be its last.)
The only other recent HBO original series with higher audience figures are “The Last of Us,” which had more than 30 million viewers for its first season in 2023, and “House of the Dragon,” which posted declines in its second season last year but still collected more than 24 million viewers.
That suggests that “The White Lotus” is not just an obsession for coastal cities like Los Angeles and New York. “When a show gets to be that big, it is fairly spread out,” Casey Bloys, the chairman of HBO and Max content, said in an interview.
Like the first two seasons, the third has received high marks from critics, though several have argued that it has been slow to develop. Mr. White, the creator, brought up the point in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
“People are already like: ‘It’s too slow! Let’s go, let’s go! Nothing’s happening!’” he said. “But nothing happened in the first season. Literally. It was basically people sitting around eating meals, but the music gave this tension, and you knew something bad was going to happen.”
So, what is making the third season so popular?
Mr. Bloys pointed to the changing of the cast and location each season, helping to create a snowball effect.
“Mike has produced three unique seasons,” he said. “People are going to have the seasons they like best, and they’ll have their theories as to why one season is better than another season.
“There’s a lot more for Mike to think about and play with thematically with the different locations and the different casts. And the viewer gets a different experience every season, and I think that just generates more interest.”
Mr. Bloys also said releasing episodes weekly, instead of all at once, helped generate more interest and a blizzard of recaps, podcasts and think pieces.
Indeed, the third season is growing on a week-to-week basis, according to Nielsen’s streaming statistics. HBO said last week’s episode had broken the series record for same-night viewership, eclipsing the previous week’s figure — also a record — by 14 percent.
With that said, “The White Lotus” is far from the most popular show in the United States. Streaming services with more subscribers, like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, have commanded higher viewership totals for their biggest hits.
During the first week of March, after the third episode of Season 3 of “The White Lotus” aired, the Netflix series “Running Point,” “Love Is Blind” and “Beauty in Black” had more viewers, as did Amazon’s “Reacher,” according to Nielsen’s most recent weekly streaming ranker.
Still, “The White Lotus” has also captured something rare in the binge-it-all-at-once streaming age: a whodunit that has drawn viewers into a week-to-week guessing game of who gets murdered and who shot the gun, akin to broadcast hits from an earlier era.
“This is where Mike really is brilliant at understanding how to bring an audience through and to get them excited,” Mr. Bloys said. “The new location allows him to talk about a different theme every season, but the mystery pulls you through.”
John Koblin covers the television industry. More about John Koblin
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