Friday Night SmackDown down 25% on the overnights

Originally published at https://www.postwrestling.com/2019/10/12/friday-night-smackdown-down-25-on-the-overnights/

WWE’s second week of the Fox era saw a dramatic decrease with the release of the overnight numbers for Friday Night SmackDown.

The first night of the WWE Draft saw the audience down 25% from last week’s premiere on Fox with the first hour averaging 2,925,000 viewers and the second producing 2,872,000 and show-long average 2,899,000 on the overnights.

The final number will be out on Tuesday reflecting the whole country.

Among people 18-49, the show did a 1.0 in the first hour and a 0.9 in the second, which was still tops among all network programming on Friday night as the silver lining.

In overall viewership, they were eighth among network programs behind Blue Bloods (7.554 million), Hawaii Five-0 (6.946), Magnum P.I. (6.407), Dateline NBC (split into two separate shows just like SmackDown is), The Blacklist, and American Housewife.

Still almost three times what AEW drew. All wrestling was down so no surprise

This is still the wrestling audience, that already existed, watching. It might be a bigger network but developing a million+ new fans that watch regularly will take time and it’ll take WWE to actually put on good shows. A drop was definitely to be expected as they hyped the debut episode up a lot and it had The Rock returning. Even with this episode, it was the draft. I can see things dipping further down to a number only slightly above their usual 2.2m that they got for their main show. Maybe 2.5m.

1 Like

You just can’t compare those two - they are on an absolute different stations, with totally different coverage and on top of everything - they are on a different day.

Anyway, I wonder how much will SD drop next Friday, after this week’ treat of a show.

1 Like