SmackDown does second best rating of fall TV season

[Big Red Machine]

Source: www.F4WOnline.com


By Paul Fontaine | @PaulAceFontaine | Dec 21, 2016 1:46 pm

Last night's episode of SmackDown on the USA Network did 2,637,000 viewers, the second best number of the fall TV season. Since September 13th, the only rating to beat it was the 900th episode on November 15th, which featured appearances by The Undertaker and Edge.

SmackDown was fifth for the night in total cable viewers, trailing three FOX News shows and Curse of Oak Island on the History Channel. The show finished second on the night in the important 18-49 demo, with a 0.88 rating.

The only big sports competition that it went against was a college football bowl game on ESPN that did 1.581 million viewers. It's also notable that most network programming was repeats, which also would've helped the SmackDown number.

Next week's show features the return of John Cena. His last return to TV after taking time off led to a sizeable ratings bump.

Below is a look at SmackDown ratings since the brand split as compared to Raw ratings from the same week. For the most part, SmackDown has finished in the 80-85 percent range of Raw's audience but was up a bit from that this week.