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LONDON — Hit show Geordie Shore, a U.K. reality series in the vein of Jersey Shore, returned to MTV U.K. for its sixth season Tuesday evening with solid overnight ratings.
Airing in the 10 p.m. time slot, the season opener drew 508,000 viewers aged 4 years and older for its live broadcast and immediate views on DVRs, according to the data. That was up 25 percent compared with the launch of the fifth season, which had aired earlier this year. The overnight figure made this the second-highest launch episode for any season of Geordie Shore.
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Tuesday’s show also drew 314,000 viewers in the demographic of adults aged 16-34, up 34 percent from the first episode of season five.
Excluding U.K. terrestrial TV channels, the figures made Geordie Shore the highest-rated program of the day on pay TV for both total viewers and the 16-34-year-old demo. The aggregate audience for the season opener will be much higher, as young audiences tend to catch up on shows throughout the week.
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Geordie Shore is the highest-rated show in MTV U.K.’s history, with some episodes drawing more than 1 million viewers.
MTV said Wednesday that the hit series was also the most tweeted about show on TV Tuesday night with more than 155,000 total tweets.
Season six was filmed in Australia and sees the return of cast member Jay Gardner, who had been featured in the show’s first three seasons.
Kerry Taylor, head of MTV U.K., earlier this year announced that Geordie Shore would go global. “Based on the unprecedented multiseason success in the U.K. and initial launches on MTV in Australia, Southern Europe and MTV.com in the U.S., MTV is extending Geordie Shore to all the network’s regions,” the network said back then. More than 20 MTV channels are premiering the show in 2013 across Asia, Latin America and northern Europe.
At a programming presentation earlier this year, MTV U.K. executives predicted that 2013 would become its “biggest and best [year] yet.”
E-mail: Georg.Szalai@THR.com
Twitter: @georgszalai
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