Friday Night SmackDown finished with one of the show’s best numbers since last April, finishing with over 2.3 million viewers on Fox.
The January 22nd edition of the show finished with an average of 2,383,000 viewers and a 0.63 in the 18-49 demographic. Compared with the previous week, viewership increased by 5.3 percent, but the 18-49 demo dropped by 7.4 percent from 0.68.
Excluding the Christmas edition of the program, which followed the NFL, it was SmackDown’s highest viewership since April 3, 2020, which was the episode leading into WrestleMania 36 weekend.
This past week’s episode finished second among all network programming in the 18-49 demo behind a new episode of ABC’s Shark Tank. SmackDown tied Shark Tank for first with adults 18-34 with each registering a 0.34 rating.
Friday’s show was built around the tease of Paul Heyman wrestling Adam Pearce, which was established in the opening segment and built up throughout the episode.
In Canada, SmackDown was fifth among all sports programs with 182,300 viewers and 91,700 in the 25-54 demo. The top sports programming was occupied by the Toronto Maple Leafs vs. Edmonton Oilers game and the Toronto Raptors vs. Miami Heat.
