It's not exactly news, but it's nice to make things official like. Yep, it's more popular than Sex And The City, The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, True Blood and the rest. Yes, it's even more popular than The Wire... THE WIRE!

Those canny folks over at Variety tweeted the declaration, which must of upset die hard Soprano fans everywhere. Therefore we can deduce that people just love watching other people get killed on telly.

According to Nielsen, it has an average (literally) gross audience of 18.2 MILLION viewers per episode. That means they've gained another 4 million viewers since season 3 (AGA was 14.4 million).

Variety reports: "The show’s fourth-season premiere in April drew a series-record 6.635 million viewers for its initial telecast - a series high and the largest audience for any HBO program since the finale of The Sopranos, which drew 11.9 million in 2007. The highest in recent years had been 5.53 million for True Blood in August 2011."

Given it's snowballing surge in popularity, one George R.R. Martin would want to get cracking... The series has already been renewed for a fifth and sixth season.