AEW continued its run of episodes on unfamiliar nights with Dynamite airing on Thursday night and increasing its overall audience from Saturday.
Thursday’s two-hour episode on TNT averaged 813,000 viewers, up 7.7 percent from Saturday’s viewership while doing an 0.29 rating in the 18-49 demographic to place 11th for the night on cable. Saturday’s episode registered a 0.31 rating.
The competition on Thursday night was mainly from cable news coverage of the Republican convention among other stories with news programming occupying eight of the top ten cable programs for the evening.
There were no sports to contend with on Thursday night after players from multiple leagues declined to play considering the events stemming from the shooting of Jacob Blake this past Sunday.
It is hard to put too much stock into this one-off number on an unfamiliar night other than Saturday and Thursday provided evidence that AEW’s audience will find the program and held up remarkably well outside its traditional night of the week.
If anything, the Saturday and Thursday ratings this week would show that Saturday proved to be a better night with males 18-49, which were down 11 percent. Adults over 50 increased 20 percent from Saturday night.
Again, it’s hard to compare as Saturday’s episode also benefited from a massive lead-in with the NBA game on TNT.
On Wednesday, the unopposed episode of NXT averaged 824,000 viewers and a 0.24 rating in the 18-49 demo.
While NXT edged out AEW by 11,000 viewers, it was AEW that won all the key demos except adults over 50 with NXT coming off TakeOver: XXX and airing in its regular night and time. Their most competitive demo was women 18-49 where AEW beat NXT with a 0.19 to a 0.17 rating. NXT had a wide margin victory with adults over 50 with a 0.41 to AEW’s 0.30.
AEW will return to its Wednesday slot next week and run unopposed with NXT airing on Tuesday night on the USA Network.
For the sake of this week’s demo comparisons, we will use AEW’s ratings from Thursday night along with last Saturday’s episode and their last Wednesday airing on August 12th:
Source: Showbuzz Daily
ADULTS 18-49
Thursday: 0.29
Saturday: 0.31
Wed. Aug. 12: 0.32
FEMALES 18-49
Thursday: 0.19
Saturday: 0.19
Wed. Aug. 12: 0.26
MALES 18-49
Thursday: 0.39
Saturday: 0.44
Wed. Aug. 12: 0.38
ADULTS 18-34
Thursday: 0.19
Saturday: 0.21
Wed. Aug. 12: 0.18
FEMALES 12-34
Thursday: 0.14
Saturday: 0.13
Wed. Aug. 12: 0.15
MALES 12-34
Thursday: 0.25
Saturday: 0.25
Wed. Aug. 12: 0.17
ADULTS 25-54
Thursday: 0.33
Saturday: 0.35
Wed. Aug. 12: 0.39
ADULTS 50+
Thursday: 0.30
Saturday: 0.25
Wed. Aug. 12: 0.26
