i have a hard time believing that game of thrones' rating were as spectacular as they are now during its first seasons.
for the uninitiated that first season was bland. it took me multiple times to finally finish the very first episode. but after i got to the last scene i just wanted to see what happened. i wasn't necessarily invested.
i don't think i started watching live until season 3. but it helped that i could binge those first seasons.
if i was george r. martin and had the pull that he has i would not have signed with syfy unless the guaranteed me a certain number of seasons up front no matter what.
GoT Ratings
S1 - 2.2-3.0 million per episode
S2 - 3.7-4.2 million per episode
S3 - 4.2-5.5 million per episode
Expanse Ratings
S1 - 0.5-1.2 million per episode
S2 - 0.47-0.7 million per episode
S3 - 0.5.-0.65 million per episode so far this season
GoT is a bad comparison as it always had decent to good ratings. Breaking Bad would be a much better comparison to Expanse and should have been the model SyFy followed.
Breaking Bad Ratings
S1 - 1.0-1.4 million per episode
S2 - 1.0-1.6 million per episode
S3 - 1.2-1.9 million per episode
S4 - 1.7-2.5 million per episode
S5a - 2.2-2.9 million per episode
S5b - 4.4-10.3 million per episode (most were over 6 million)
Breaking bad didn't have very good ratings until Netflix added it to its streaming service, people binged it and work of mouth spread that it was really good, then in S5b its ratings skyrocketed. I believe Expanse could have done the same for SyFy, especially if they didn't just dump it. No one wants to invest in shows on a station if that station just dumps everything after a couple/few seasons.