With the big reveal twist out of the way, we’re heading into the final two episodes of Peacemaker Season 2 — and if you’re on certain corners of the internet, it feels like hype is through the roof. But what about the quote-unquote real world? What are the Peacemaker Season 2 viewership numbers? And is Peacemaker Season 2 a hit?
Like most things in the world of streaming, in full disclosure, it’s hard to say without knowing the benchmarks that DC Studios, HBO Max, and their parent company Warner Bros. Discovery have set for the show. Maybe by whatever standards they’re looking at, it’s doing great. Certainly, if you are enjoying the show, that’s also great. But there are some metrics we can take a look at, and the short answer is that, on a certain level, sure, Peacemaker Season 2 is a hit. But when you look at traditional viewership numbers, the answer is “no” with a side of “we don’t really know yet, and may never know.”
That’s pretty unsatisfying, right? So let’s dig into a couple of the ways we can see if Peacemaker Season 2 is a hit, and what we know about the Peacemaker Season 2 viewership.
Critical Response To Peacemaker Season 2
Usually with a TV show, it’s a little tricky to judge the overall critical response. Aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic tend to have far more data from, say, major movies, which almost universally will get 200+ reviews. Contrast that to TV shows, which often have less than 50, and as seasons continue, far fewer than that.
However, Peacemaker, given the interconnected nature of the DCU going into Season 2, clearly had more eyeballs on it from critics and more interest from media outlets. So in a rare case, we actually see an increase in the number of reviews on Rotten Tomatoes from Season 1 to Season 2 — and in critical favor. Peacemaker Season 1 was 93% fresh with 91 reviews; Peacemaker Season 2 is 96% fresh with 103 reviews.
My caveat here is that Rotten Tomatoes is an aggregation that breaks reviews into either “fresh” or “rotten” and that’s it. There’s no nuance there, meaning someone could hate most of a show and then say “but ultimately you should watch it because [BLANK]” and it gets categorized as “fresh.” I’m also, not to be dismissive, not counting audience scores since they’re easy to manipulate, and usually are logged by people inclined to log into Rotten Tomatoes and leave a review, which means they’re already highly invested in the show in some direction (negative/positive).
Meanwhile, Metacritic rates by an out of 100 score and is much more selective in terms of critics. Season 1 got a 73% based on 44 reviews; Season 2 got a 78% based on 18 reviews. That’s more in line with the pattern one would expect from reviews for a TV show — but of note, in both cases the score increased. It seems like at least for critics, Peacemaker Season 2 is a success.
How Does Peacemaker Season 2 Fare On Google Trends?
Here’s another inexact measurement, but Google Trends measures search volume, which can be boiled down to “how invested are people in finding out more about your show?” Given increasingly unhelpful changes in Google’s structure (see: their ethically abysmal and virtually unusable AI results), it’s harder than ever to use this as a measure. Add in that TV shows are all on different schedules, and it’s all very apples to oranges.
But in the interest of trying to answer the central thesis of this piece, let’s take a look at Peacemaker versus another weekly releases that is part of a larger sci-fi franchise: Alien: Earth.
To break down what you’re seeing above, the red curve is FX and Hulu’s Alien: Earth; the blue is HBO Max’s Peacemaker. The former show premiered on August 12, which is the huge spike you can see at the beginning. And each subsequent spike is for a weekly episode, which debuted on Tuesday nights. Similar to Peacemaker, there’s a spike — though it’s about half as big — for the premiere on August 21, and much smaller spikes on Thursdays, when new episodes appear.
While it’s clear that Peacemaker is not quite as highly searched as Alien: Earth, there is an interesting thing worth looking at this past week, aka the week of the big reveal: the search interest seems to be creeping up to premiere levels. Whether that will continue to build in the final two weeks is TBD.
To throw in one more point of comparison: Netflix’s Wednesday. The trick here is that Wednesday Season 2 dropped in two chunks, on August 6 and September 3. Netflix shows generally have less sustained interest due to the binge drop, but let’s take a look anyway, since it is once again an extension of a nerdy franchise on TV.
As you can see, Wednesday (the yellow curve) dwarfs both of them. That’s not a huge shocker, as it’s one of the biggest shows on Netflix and was returning after a long gap since Season 1. But still, when we’re looking specifically at Peacemaker, while there’s definitely interest in the show, it’s not as strong as either of the others.
What Are The Peacemaker Season 2 Viewership Numbers?
Super long wind-up there, huh? Here’s what we know about the actual viewership numbers: not much. But not knowing any actual total numbers doesn’t mean we know nothing; it just means we have to read between the lines.
First up? Samba TV numbers. About a month ago, the company shared a post on X (formerly Twitter) saying that the show was up 22% versus the Season 1 finale, and even shared some actual figures: 638,000 viewers for the Season 1 premiere, 584,000 viewers for the Season 1 finale, and 712,000 viewers for the Season 2 premiere.
Quick question: what is Samba TV, exactly? It’s smart TV technology that, in this case, is only measuring people who have Samba smart TVs. So not exactly the entire audience, or even necessarily a representative of the overall audience. It is a good sign — in general — that more people who own Samba TVs watched the Season 2 premiere versus the Season 1 premiere. However, even by Samba TV’s own standards, Peacemaker Season 2 had fallen out of the Top 10 by Episode 4, and per the company, was ranking at number 16 on their streaming originals chart. Yikes.
There’s a much better measure, though, which is Nielsen’s Top 10. The independent company reports its overall streaming numbers 30 days behind, so the mild caveat here is that we only have Nielsen’s rankings for the first two episodes of Peacemaker. So where does Peacemaker Season 2 rank on Nielsen’s Top 10 for the season premiere, and second week of viewing?
…It doesn’t. In the first week, the #10 show was Love Is Blind: UK, with 20 episodes and a total of 326 million minutes viewed (MMV). #9 was Alien: Earth with three episodes, and 337 MMV. Top of the chart? Wednesday, with 12 episodes and 1,129 MMV. The reason I mention the number of episodes, by the way, is that if you couldn’t figure it out, Nielsen measures by overall minutes viewed for a show in a week, versus episode by episode. So more episodes usually means a better possibility of more minutes viewed… And a second season show like Peacemaker has a better chance of popping into the Top 10 even if it was absent in Season 1.
In the second week, Peacemaker also does not appear. Alien: Earth is number 10 with 326 MMV, while Netflix’s My Life With The Walter Boys topped the charts for August 25 through August 31 with 987 MMV.
Again, we’re early in the run here, and maybe the increased number of episodes and the interest after this Episode 6 twist might make the viewership increase. But as is, Peacemaker is not a viewership hit, at least according to Nielsen’s streaming original Top 10.
There’s an even more worrisome lack of point of data here: HBO Max hasn’t shared numbers for the show. Normally, when a show does well by whatever standard a streamer is looking at, they tout it in the trades in the weirdest, most specific way possible (“It was the most-watched 48-minute-long premiere of a second season on a Thursday of late 2025!”). For Peacemaker, we haven’t heard anything — which doesn’t necessarily mean anything, either, but it just means they’re not thrilled enough with their data splice to send out a press release.
There is one positive glimmer, though: on the site FlixPatrol, which measures from several sources to figure out where a show ranks on a service itself, Peacemaker is ranked from 1-3 in most countries for the past week on HBO Max. That’s far from exact, but hey: it’s something.
So… Is Peacemaker Season 2 A Hit?
To sum up here, just in terms of what we know about viewership versus the current landscape of television? No, Peacemaker is not a hit. However, it has hit critically, and the fans are invested, so that’s certainly something to crow about. And if it’s keeping people returning to HBO Max every week, per the FlixPatrol rankings? That’s actually more important to a streaming service than raw numbers… They want people to get the habit of opening their app with regularity (this is called “reducing churn”), almost more than they want lots of people watching the show.
Even if the Peacemaker Season 2 viewership numbers aren’t through the roof, and this is pure speculation here, I’d guess that it’s serving the same purpose as James Gunn’s Superman. That also wasn’t a runaway hit in theaters, but it did well enough in terms of numbers. And more importantly, it was a critical hit that is helping reverse the sour taste years of DC Comics-based bombs left on the brand. Peacemaker Season 2 seems to be doing the same.
But ultimately, if you’re enjoying the show, who cares? Well, I care. I just spent nearly two thousand words trying to figure out whether the show was a hit or not. As is, Peacemaker may not be the cultural behemoth fans might want it to be. But neither is Peacemaker Season 2, to paraphrase the great Rick Flag Jr, a joke.
Peacemaker Season 2 Premiere Dates And Episode Guide:
Peacemaker season 2 premiered on HBO Max on Thursday, August 21. The season will be eight episodes long, with one episode premiering per week.
Here’s the full list of episodes in Peacemaker Season 2, with premiere dates:
- Thursday, August 21, 2025: Peacemaker, Season 2, Episode 1
- Thursday, August 28, 2025: Peacemaker, Season 2, Episode 2
- Thursday, September 4, 2025: Peacemaker, Season 2, Episode 3
- Thursday, September 11, 2025: Peacemaker, Season 2, Episode 4
- Thursday, September 18, 2025: Peacemaker, Season 2, Episode 5
- Thursday, September 25, 2025: Peacemaker, Season 2, Episode 6
- Thursday, October 2, 2025: Peacemaker, Season 2, Episode 7
- Thursday, October 9, 2025: Peacemaker, Season 2, Episode 8 *Season Finale*
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