TRUE BLOOD Final Season Premiere Up 3% from Last Season

The season premiere of the final season of True Blood tallied a gross audience of 5.8 million viewers Sunday night across its four plays, up 3% from last season's debut night (5.6 million viewers).

At 9:00PM, viewership averaged 4 million viewers with another 1 million, 498,000 and 262,000 added at 10:00PM, 11:30PM and 1:00AM, respectively. Last season, True Blood had an average gross audience of 10.7 million viewers.

True Blood began its ten-episode, seventh and final season SUNDAY, JUNE 22 at 9:00 p.m. Mixing romance, suspense, mystery and humor, the series takes place in a world where vampires and humans co-exist, after vampires have come out of the coffin, thanks to the invention of mass-produced synthetic blood that means they no longer need humans as a nutritional source.

The series follows waitress and part-faerie Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin), who can hear people's thoughts, vampire Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer) and vampire Eric Northman (Alexander Skarsgård). Alan Ball created the show, which is based on the bestselling Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris.