Going against the second night of the NFL Draft, Friday Night SmackDown hit another all-time low for a Fox broadcast.
The overnight figures pegged SmackDown at 2,104,000 viewers and were down 8% from last week’s previous low on Fox.
That was broken down to 2,050,000 for the first hour and 1,978,000 in the second hour. The show led up to the Triple H twenty-fifth-anniversary celebration that took up the final two segments of the show. It included live appearances by Shawn Michaels and Vince McMahon and cameos from Ric Flair, Stephanie McMahon, and Road Dogg by phone.
This week had a larger sports competition with the NFL Draft running on ABC and other cable properties. We only have the ABC data, which shows the draft doing 3.44 million viewers between 8-10 pm Eastern.
SmackDown also fell to 0.5 in the 18-49 demographic trailing all other programs on ABC, CBS, and NBC on Friday night. That had been the key demographic that SmackDown had been performing well in during Fridays.
The overnight figure doesn’t reflect the entire country with the final number out Tuesday.
