Friday Night SmackDown bounces back in overnight ratings

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Originally published at https://www.postwrestling.com/2019/11/02/friday-night-smackdown-bounces-back-in-overnight-ratings/

The overnight numbers for Friday Night SmackDown are in and showed an increase in size from their last broadcast on Fox two weeks ago.

The show, highlighted by an NXT invasion, averaged 2,543,000 viewers in the overnight ratings that cover the top metered markets. The final numbers will be out on Tuesday to reflect the entire country.

This comes off a disastrous figure of 888,000 viewers last week for a one-week airing of SmackDown on FS 1, due to Fox’s coverage of the World Series. Throwing out last week’s number, the show was up 5% from the October 18th edition that had a final figure of 2,418,000 viewers.

This week’s show did a 0.6 among adults 18-34 and a 0.8 with adults 18-49, both topping all other network programs on Friday night.

This week’s show was thrown out the window once it learned that talent returning from Saudi Arabia would not make it back in time for the show. They flew in talent from NXT on a charter flight and they became the focus of the show, including NXT champion Adam Cole pinning Daniel Bryan in the main event. It ended with Paul Levesque cutting a spirited promo setting up this year’s Survivor Series with the theme of Raw vs. SmackDown vs. NXT.

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Do you know the hour by hour? I’d be interested to see if it grew in hour 2 due to word of mouth of all the nxt appearances.

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Book a good show get good ratings

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Next week’s number (and, more importantly, next week’s product) will be way more interesting… hopefully for a positive reason.

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Or just stay on the channel people expect you to be on…

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That’s good to see. They have a real opportunity for some compelling television with the invasion leading up to survivor series. They have definitely been dropping the ball lately, but I hope they get this one right.

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This can only be good news for NXT on Wednesday. Be interesting to see their numbers this week.
Let’s hope WWE doesn’t lose all positive momentum leading out of this. They need to advertise a Main roster retaliation on NXT to further add more number I hope/believe they’ve gained from Fridays Smackdown.