This is a respectable start for the opinion-splitting comedy, but is slightly down on last year’s pilot episode.
Comedy continues to perform well for BBC One on a Monday with Miranda (7m/27.1%) and Mrs Brown’s Boys (7.1m/27.4%) continuing to pull in more viewers than Lewis on ITV, which drew in 6.1m (23.8%) this week.
Death in Paradise basked in the glow of 6.5m (26.8%) viewers on Tuesday, in stark contrast to the measly 793k people that tuned in for the opening episode of the second season of the rebooted Dallas on Channel 5. The first season opened with nearly 3m viewers last year and it looks like the loss of Larry Hagman may be a cross that is too large to bear.
Meanwhile, Silent Witness managed to pile up the bodies once more on Thursday with 5.7m (24.5%) and How I Met Your Mother returned to E4 with 1.1m (4.7%) viewers.
> Buy Death in Paradise on DVD on Amazon.
All data was supplied by Attentional, Digital Spy and The Guardian.
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