The viewership numbers for this past Friday’s September 13 USA Network premiere edition of WWE SmackDown have been revealed.
After five years on Fox, Friday’s show marked the first episode of a new five-year deal with USA for SmackDown.
As reported by Wrestlenomics, the show drew an average of 1.723 million viewers, and a 0.55 rating in the 18-49 demo.
SmackDown was headlined by a steel cage match between Cody Rhodes and Solo Sikoa for Rhodes’ Undisputed WWE Championship, and an appearance from Roman Reigns, which hadn’t been advertised in advance for a few weeks after it was initially.
Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer wrote:
Smackdown did 1.72M/0.55. I’d consider that excellent even with the return of Reigns and the title cage match, especially for a Friday.
Same show on FOX would probably be in the 2.4M to 2.5M range, so let’s say 70% meaning normal in the 1.5M range I’d think.
We’ll know normal in a few weeks.
Last week was billed as ‘WWE Week’ on USA with Raw, NXT and SmackDown all airing on the network on Monday, Tuesday and Friday respectively.
That’ll be the case until October, when NXT moves to the CW Network on October 1 to begin a five-year deal.
Raw moves to Netflix in January, which is a 10-year deal, although Netflix has the option to drop it at five or add an additional 10.
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