For the second week in a row, AEW and NXT were affected by news coverage with this week’s focus on the second impeachment of President Donald Trump after the House of Representatives’ vote.
While cable news wasn’t at the level of last week’s coverage of the attack on the Capitol, news programming still occupied the top fifteen slots on Wednesday.
AEW finished #31 for the evening with a 0.30 in the 18-49 demographic while averaging 762,000 viewers. The figures were improvements of 20 and 15 percent respectively.
NXT was outside the top fifty cable programs again finishing with a 0.14 in the key demo and averaged 551,000 viewers. They dropped 12.5 percent in the demo and 14 percent in viewers from last week’s New Year’s Evil special. Because it didn’t chart with the top fifty cable programs, we don’t have a breakdown of the demos from Showbuzz Daily.
While disregarding last week because of the news, it was AEW’s lowest demo figure and viewership since Thanksgiving Eve in November.
The episode of AEW to contrast with is the December 23rd show as the prior two weeks were unique episodes with the tribute for Brodie Lee and last week’s heavy news coverage. Looking back to the 12/23 show, they were close in most demos except adults 18-34 (0.23 to 0.15 this week), and men 12-34 (0.27 to 0.18).
Next week won’t be any better as news coverage should be high given it’s the day of the inauguration for President-Elect Joe Biden.
In Canada, AEW was facing huge sports competition on the opening night of the NHL season. The sports programming charts were dominated by hockey and led by the Toronto Maple Leafs vs. Montreal Canadiens game on Sportsnet that did 2,138,000 viewers head-to-head with AEW. Dynamite still managed 91,100 viewers and 38,700 in the 25-54 demographic and were seventh for the night among sports. They were down from the previous week’s figure of 159,700.
