The NFL and college football had a big night last Friday, leading to SmackDown dropping to its second-lowest viewership since moving to USA Network.
The November 29 episode of SmackDown was a taped edition of the show on the night before the Survivor Series. The show centered around a sit-down segment involving Roman Reigns, CM Punk, and Paul Heyman, and the “Advantage Match” between Jacob Fatu and Jey Uso before WarGames.
The episode attracted an audience of 1,341,000 viewers, including 536,000 viewers (0.40 rating) in the 18-49 demographic, which ranked first among cable programs in prime time. Programming Insider first reported the data.
In the 18-49 demographic, SmackDown experienced a 29% drop among female viewers averaging 129,000 with male viewership only dropping by 2% from the prior week with 377,000.
Amazon aired its Black Friday game between the Kansas City Chiefs and Las Vegas Raider, which had 13.5 million viewers, according to Bloomberg.
While SmackDown topped the cable chart on Friday, its linear competition included the Georgia vs. Georgia Tech college football game on ABC, which saw 8,467,000 viewers tune in and a 1.87 rating in the core demo. NBC also aired a college game with an audience of 3.6 million and 0.73 in the demo.
SmackDown was comfortably ahead of its cable contemporaries as it topped the L.A. Clippers vs. Minnesota Timberwolves (723,000 viewers and 0.23 in the demo), “Deck the Halls” on Hallmark (1,498,000 and 0.15), and Gutfeld on Fox News (1,879,000 and 0.14).
The show averaged 308,700 viewers on Sportsnet 360 in Canada along with 121,100 in the 25-54 demographic. It ranked third for the night among sports programming behind the NFL and a Toronto Raptors game.
