Wednesday night’s premiere of Arrow, the TV series based on DC Comics’ Green Arrow, attracted 4.02 million viewers, the most for any show on the CW network in three years.  It performed better than any CW show since the premiere of The Vampire Diaries in September of 2009 manage to garner 4.91 million viewers.
 
Arrow also had a positive effect on the long-running Supernatural series that follows it.  Supernatural scored the best ratings it has earned in over two years with 2.6 million viewers. 
 
While Arrow is off to a great start, the real challenge will be to maintain a good portion of the audience that turned out to watch the premiere.  If Arrow can hold a sizable portion of its initial audience (or even build on it), it will be great news for DC, since the comics publisher is launching an Arrow comic book in November (see "Monthly 'Arrow' Series").