‘Girls’ season 4, ‘Looking’ season 2 premiere numbers low for HBO

It is hard to be a comedy series in 2015, provided of course that your name is not “The Big Bang Theory.” We got a better sense of that upon looking at some of the latest HBO ratings for Sunday night.

Last year, the premiere of “Girls” and “Looking” was aided slightly by coming on the air after “True Detective.” Not this time. For starters, the premiere of the Lena Dunham series only pulled in (per Deadline) around 680,000 viewers on Sunday night. That is down more than 35% from the season 3 premiere. Both years the show opened against the Golden Globes, so that cannot be used as much of an excuse. Given that the ratings were close on par to the season 3 finale, we’d argue mostly that the show lost a good bit of its steam during what we thought was a disappointing 2014 for the series.

What we thought was an even more saddening figure were the numbers for the Jonathan Groff series “Looking.” With under 200,000 viewers, it saw a 45% decline from the series premiere. This show was hurt mostly by airing on an island at 10:00 p.m. after “Girls” and “Togetherness.” We feel like it is a strong, interesting comedy, but it doesn’t exactly have a name that will be remembered by many other than its diehard fans.

When you look across the board at HBO, most of their comedies these days are the ones buoyed by coming on after a drama. “Game of Thrones” is instrumental to the success of both “Silicon Valley” and “Veep,” for example, while some other shows like “Getting On” fail to generate anything close to the same level of publicity.

What do you think about these ratings? Let us know in the comments.