You can go ahead and start planning your season-three Game of Thrones premiere party now. HBO’s epic adventure series returned Sunday to dragon-size ratings, attracting a series-best 3.9 million viewers with its season-two premiere. That’s up a whopping 53 percent from the show’s season one finale, indicating plenty of folks spent the past year catching up via DVDs and HBO Go. It also puts GoT in the same ballpark as the network’s other monster hit, True Blood, which began its most recent season with just over 5 million viewers. (Add in Sunday’s same-night repeats of the GoT premiere and tune-in soars to over 6 million.) There’s no doubt the seven gods who rule HBO are quite happy today. The only question now isn’t whether HBO will order a third season of the show, but rather, will the network double down and do a two-year renewal, allowing producers to spread the filming of George R.R. Martin’s really, really long third novel (A Storm of Swords) over two seasons.
