This week’s WWE television viewership painted a strong picture with Raw and SmackDown Live posting three-month highs with their respective programs.
Monday’s episode of Raw from Miami was promoted around Brock Lesnar’s first appearance on Raw since April 23rd and led to the show’s highest viewership since April 30th.
The show also featured Ronda Rousey’s return from her storyline suspension, although barely missed any shows during that five-week story.
The three-hour program averaged 2,896,000 viewers.
The first hour averaged 2,875,000 viewers and increased 5% in the second hour to 3,012,000 viewers with a smaller drop than usual to 2,815,000 viewers for the final hour, which was built around Lesnar’s appearance at the conclusion.
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Tuesday’s episode of SmackDown Live averaged 2,401,000 viewers on the USA Network, which was up 2.6% from last week and their highest viewership since May 1st.
Tuesday’s show didn’t promote much ahead of time beyond Jeff Hardy returning to confront Randy Orton and that Samoa Joe would be on the show. It says that the programs in place for SummerSlam are connecting at a better rate than the past months where SmackDown had dropped during the NBA playoffs and hadn’t recovered until the past two episodes.
The second week of “Miz & Mrs” on Tuesday night, saw the 30-minute reality series drop 11.5% with 1,303,000 watching the second episode.
The show did beat out “Chrisley Knows Best”, which followed it at 10:30 pm ET and averaged 1,146,000 viewers. That series was airing at 10 pm prior to the addition of “Miz & Mrs” and has dropped noticeably in the new timeslot with a weaker lead-in than SmackDown.
