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Hello and welcome to a new feature here at Pro Wrestling Musings where we'll be keeping track of all of the TV viewers of the 4 major weekly US TV wrestling shows (Raw, NXT, Dynamite, Smackdown). I'll be taking all of the numbers directly from Showbuzz Daily, and doing my best to keep everything updated whenever they issue corrections or changes. So here we go, on with the numbers.
This was a big week for AEW. Their P18-49 (All adults from 18-49) demo rating had been consistently around 0.29 for 3 straight weeks, due to the 3 back-to-back special editions of Dynamite and coming off those, anticipitation was high as to whether they could maintain their numbers. The week before, NXT was coming fresh off of The Great American Bash TV special and had lost 0.06 in the P18-49 demo and 128,000 viewers despite a show which featured a women's title match and a double championship match. AEW was promoting what seemed to be a weaker card, there was only a TNT Championship match and no other title matches, and Moxley was only to be featured in a promo.
However, they came out of the gates and smashed it. Jumping up 57,000 viewers to 815,000, their best number since March 25th, and hitting a 0.32 in the P18-49 Demo, their best since May 27th. This was good for a 5th place finish on the cable charts, and also scoring the best M18-49 ( Men from 18 to 49 years old) rating of anything on cable TV, with a 0.44. These are very encouraging numbers and now the test is to see how they can maintain them with real sports coming back as competition.
In NXT news, they seem to have at least temporarily settled back in the low 600k viewers and the high teens for the P18-49 demo. This week they scored 615,000 viewers (down from 631,000) and a 0.17 in 18-49, up from 0.14 last week which was good for a 35th place finish. In good news, they do seem to have recovered from the scarily low 0.02 in M12-34 last week, scoring a slightly more respectable 0.08 this week. Losing all the extra viewers they gained from The Great American Bash must be tough, and with sports coming back we may not have seen the bottom of these numbers.
WWE Raw was up from their record low total viewers last week, the fallout from Extreme Rules and a heavily promoted Randy Orton vs Big Show match brought in 1,630,000 viewers, up from 1,561,00 last week, but still the second worst number of all time. There was similar news in the P18-49 number as well, scoring a record low of 0.46 and tying the number from May 4th. This was actually below the combined total for Wednesday Night, with AEW and NXT scoring a 0.49 overall. To put into perspective how low this number was, AEW actually tied Raw in the F12-34 demo despite having wrestling competition, both shows scored a 0.14 which was unthinkable even a month ago.
Smackdown has continued to plug along at under 2 million viewers, the most recent episode brought in 1,893,000 viewers which is a drop of roughly 2 million from their debut but not too far off where they've been since the move to empty arena shows. It also scored a 0.5 in P18-49, again pretty much average for an empty arena show but actually only 0.01 above the Wednesday Night number.