Despite a rare match involving a star from the main roster, NXT 2.0 fell beneath 200,000 viewers in the 18-49 demographic.
After two consecutive weeks above that mark, the January 11th edition of the averaged approximately 177,000 viewers in the 18-49 demo and 647,000 overall finishing #40 among cable originals, per Brandon Thurston of Wrestlenomics and Showbuzz Daily.
The overall audience only fell by 3 percent from last week’s New Year’s Evil special while the key demo decreased by 14 percent.
The show was built around the main event between AJ Styles and Grayson Waller after several weeks of building towards the match including appearances by Waller on Raw.
Last week’s show was the strongest figures for NXT 2.0 since Halloween Havoc in October. This week, 18-34 demo dropped by 26 percent with males in the demo dropping from 43,000 to 35,000 and females declining from 42,000 to 28,000, according to Brandon Thurston.
The one area that performed better than last week was among the 50+ demo, which grew from 0.35 to 0.38 this week.
This week’s episode still outperformed NXT 2.0’s December 2021 average of 601,000 viewers, 171,000 in 18-49, and 54,500 in 18-34.
The key sports competition on Tuesday were two college basketball games airing back-to-back on ESPN. Kentucky vs. Vanderbilt averaged 938,000 and 0.27 in 18-49, which ended just after 9 p.m. ET. Auburn vs. Alabama started immediately after and averaged 855,000 and 0.26 respectively with the games finishing #3 and #4 among cable originals. The cable chart was topped by Curse of Oak Island at 9 p.m. with 2,509,000 viewers and 0.33 in the demo.
In Canada, the show performed very well with an average of 89,000 viewers on Sportsnet 360. While there are two episodes of NXT since September where we don’t have the data, of the available weeks, this week’s number would be the highest since the launch of NXT 2.0 on September 14th.
