Call it better ratings through chemistry.
The opening salvo of “Breaking Bad’s” final eight episodes shattered series records last night — snaring nearly 6 million viewers and also setting the Twitterverse on fire.
That viewership number (5.9 million) doubles the five-year-old drama’s previous best.
The highly anticipated episode, “Blood Money” — which aired 11 months after last season’s finale — was also a hit on Twitter.
It spawned nearly 760,00 tweets and 11,800 tweets-per-minute at its peak, with viewers responding to the episode’s highlights — including its final scene, which featured a violent, bloody closed-garage showdown between DEA Agent Hank Schrader (Dean Norris) and his meth-kingpin brother-in-law, series anti-hero Walter White (Bryan Cranston).
The episode also pulled in 3.6 million viewers in the advertiser-coveted demo of adults 18-49 — second in AMC history to network stablemate “The Walking Dead.”
Meanwhile, the premiere of “Low Winter Sun,” which followed “Breaking Bad” at 10 p.m., averaged 2.5 million viewers — mediocre numbers for the Detroit-based cop drama, considering it lost nearly 3.5 million viewers from its “BB” lead-in.