Lovecraft Country Premiere Nearly Scores Watchmen Premiere Numbers for HBO

HBO's new series Lovecraft Country debuted Sunday night and the Jurnee Smollett, Jonathan Majors, and Courtney B. Vance-starring series drew impressive numbers for its premiere. The genre-bending new series premiered to 760,000 total viewers in its 9 p.m. linear spot, according to Variety, a number that's just behind the hit series Watchmen's premiere and also stacks up well to HBO's more recent Perry Mason. Lovecraft Country also performed well across all platforms, including HBO Max, bringing in 1.4 million total viewers. The series was the most-watched show on Sunday night on HBO Max and was also the second largest digital premiere since 2019's Watchmen and Chernobyl.

Based on Matt Ruff's novel of the same name, Lovecraft Country follows 25-year-old Korean war vet Atticus Black (Majors), who along with his friend Letitia "Leti" Lewis (Smollett), and his Uncle George (Vance) to head out on a road trip to find his missing father. Set in the Jim Crow America of the 1950s, the trio must survive and overcome both the racist terrors of white America and the malevolent spirits that could be ripped straight from a Lovecraft paperback.

Even in just the first episode, Lovecraft Country doesn't shy away from either of those horrors, either, with an opening sequence full of Lovecraft monsters as well as moments that directly address the racism not only of H.P. Lovecraft himself, but of the time period as well, including a particularly harrowing scene that exposes the dark history of America's so-called "Sundown Towns".

"Matt [Ruff]'s book is beautiful. It's the idea of reclaiming the genre for people who the genre typically hasn't been for," series creator and showrunner Misha Green recently explained to Marie Claire. "I watch all these sci-fi movies, and they're set in the future, and there are no people of color in [them]. It's all white people being oppressed by robots. And I'm like, Is this really a story of white people being oppressed? Any time I'm adapting anything, it's always the beautiful first jumping-off point that you have to take to a new place. When you're making art, you have to be making art of the times. And so, it was just a natural thing to take the elements from his book that were still so relevant, because history keeps repeating itself."

You can check out our review of episodes 1-5 of Lovecraft Country here.

Lovecraft Country airs Sundays on HBO.