Gritty crime drama is a social success

Nidge (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor) had hardly calmed down after his end-of-season prison cell tantrum before Emma Daly and Neasa McDonagh at Mindshare had crunched the numbers showing just how much of an audience grabber the finale of RTÉ crime drama Love/Hate proved to be. An average of 999,000 people tuned in, with numbers peaking at 1,111,000 – a staggering viewing figure for a drama.

To put it in context, the station's runaway rating topper, the Late Late Toy Show, last year had an average of 1,319,000 viewers.

The hype surrounding the final episode meant that it pulled 31,000 more viewers than the opening episode, a rare achievement in TV drama as it is more usual for viewers to fall off as a series continues.

Such has been the success of Love/Hate that most episodes broke the one million viewership threshold. Mindshare put this figure in context by pointing out the X Factor draws an average of 435,000 viewers in Ireland per episode.

Social media monitor Olytico measured the Twitter reaction showing that the finale generated 22,779 mentions online between 9pm-11pm peaking at 1,053 tweets per minute. The peak came as the final credits rolled and viewers took to Twitter to give their verdict.