The return of Lucha Underground on Wednesday night saw the fourth season premiere average 143,000 viewers on the El Rey Network. There was no number listed for the 9 pm replay of the series opener.
The figure of 143,000 viewers is more than a lot of Lucha Underground’s combined viewership figures from Season 3 and the highest average for a single airing since the August 23rd, 2017 episode, which was built up for weeks for a match between Johnny Mundo and Rey Mysterio.
The season-finale on October 11th last year averaged a total of 139,000 viewers with 96,000 watching the premiere airing and 43,000 watching the immediate replay afterward.
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In the WWE, SmackDown Live remains stagnant with 2,183,000 viewers watching this past Tuesday’s episode on the USA Network. The audience has not bounced back since the conclusion of the NBA playoffs and was only up 45,000 viewers from the week prior. After the show hit a 2018 high of 2,888,000 viewers on March 20th on the day that Daniel Bryan was cleared to return to the ring, numbers stayed strong throughout WrestleMania and most of April, before experiencing a sizable drop in May, which has continued into the month of June.
Monday Night Raw was up 8% this week with 2,720,000 viewers watching on the USA Network with several four-way matches and a face-to-face between Nia Jax and Ronda Rousey promoted in advance. The show opened with 2.75 million viewers and increased to 2.81 in the second hour before the usual third-hour drop down to 2.63 million viewers. The show built to a four-way match involving Braun Strowman, Finn Balor, Kevin Owens, and Bobby Roode, which was a match that lasted 26 minutes to close the show.
This was the highest viewership for Raw since May 14th, which was the taped show from London, England during the European tour.
Total Bellas continued its resurgence with another jump in viewership for Sunday’s episode that averaged 734,000 viewers. The viewership was up 12% from last week’s previous season-high mark of 654,000 viewers. The show has rebounded significantly after the first two episodes of the season were the lowest in Total Bellas history, despite heightened coverage of John Cena and Nikki Bella’s breakup leading into the season premiere.
The UFC 225 preliminary card from this past Saturday night on FS 1 averaged 667,000 viewers and peaked with 848,000 viewers for the prelim main event between Alistair Overeem and Curtis Blaydes, featuring a third-round stoppage victory by Blaydes.
The UFC 225 post-fight show on FS 1 only did 86,000 viewers but followed a very long pay-per-view with the post-show not beginning until 1:27 am Eastern. The post-show received a lot of attention in the days that followed for Michael Bisping’s treatment of interim welterweight champion Colby Covington during his interview on the show as the two cut promos on the other.
