Okay, so this was last week’s show on FS1. It was by far the smallest network that any major WWE show has ever aired on, a huge step down from FOX. And it was something they were only doing for one week. They promoted it as well as could be on what seemed like short notice, but still, we only knew it would be on FS1 about a week and a half out from my recollection. So I’m not gonna sit here and pretend that this number is a massive story that spells doom and gloom for SmackDown.
But it is a story, and it is a cause for concern. Because everyone expected a pretty damn big dip in the ratings for SmackDown’s pre-emption to FS1, caused by the World Series being covered on Fox that night. But the number we got was still quite the shock.
Friday Night’s SmackDown got an average of 888,000 viewers.
That… is awful. There’s no real way to spin that as anything other than awful. Most were thinking this would end up in the million-and-a-half range. I was honestly ready to chuckle and joke about a low million.
888K… that’s unreal. Even with all the caveats, that’s shocking.
I probably don’t have to tell you this is the lowest rated SmackDown in history. But it’s far worse than even that implies. Before last week, the worst rated SmackDown was the 2015 New Year’s Eve episode, their last night on SyFy. That show… drew 1.6 million viewers. That’s right, not only did the FS1 SmackDown break the record, it did so with nearly half the viewers.
And mind you, that was before the brand extension, which greatly boosted SmackDown’s numbers. Back then, SmackDown was basically Thunder, a glorified B-Show that you could legit skip and miss nothing of note most weeks. Tended to have good wrestling but it was filler, with all of WWE’s angles just kinda holding in place until the next Raw.
That show… pre-brand split SmackDown, on SyFy, on New Year’s Eve… pretty much doubled the rating of this past SmackDown.
It gets worse.
There are two really obvious stats to compare this to. The first is that AEW Dynamite did 969,000 viewers this week. Sure, there’s plenty of asterisks to be given here, but… significantly more people watched Dynamite than SmackDown last week. More people watched the entirety of Britt Baker vs. Jamie Hayter than Hulk Hogan, Ric Flair & Roman Reigns on the opening of SmackDown. These are facts!
The other stat is the rating the FOX premiere got. Honestly if not for FOX’s issues with Dish, it almost certainly would’ve broken 4 million viewers. But as things stood, it got… 3,888,000 viewers.
Yeah. By estimation, approximately 3 million more viewers than last week. 3,888,000 on the first week of October, 888,000 on the last week of October. Uncanny.
And just to really put this into perspective, I looked into Impact’s numbers during their final weeks on SpikeTV. Back in December of 2014, when they had already been cancelled earlier in the year, in their last three weeks… they averaged 960,000 viewers.
Does it mean anything? Probably not as much as it looks… the ratings will certainly be astronomically higher on Fox next week. And SmackDown’s been in a weird state of flux for a while. Ratings probably won’t stabilize until after the November 8th show.
But man, is it ever a shocking number. And it’s yet another story in what has turned out to be a rough, rough month for WWE.
