It’s all relative, but when your ratings go up 32.9 percent from a bad week, that means you’re going to want to do whatever you think got you there again.
That’s bad news for fans of WWE who aren’t into dumb wedding storylines like the one involving Bobby Lashley, Rusev and Lana, which apparently hit in the ratings this week.
The Monday “Raw” drew an average of 2.439 million viewers, up from the record-low 1.835 million for last week’s pre-taped, pre-Christmas episode.
That’s your 32.9 percent spike, though, fun with numbers, it was from a record low, and the viewership was ever so slightly above the average for “Raw” for the whole of 2019.
“Raw” averaged 2.418 million viewers in 2019, down from the 2.823 million average in 2018, which itself was down from the 3.018 million tuning in on average in 2017.
The longer-term trends, then, are bad.
Short term, 2.439 million was the best viewership since the Sept. 30 episode.
The best viewership after that one, which was billed as the “season premiere,” was the 2.342 million for the Oct. 21 post-draft episode.
Numbers held steady in the 2 million to 2.2 million range thereafter, until the big drop for the Dec. 23 episode, which had been taped a week earlier, and then the big boost for the dumb wedding angle.
The way the people who make the calls in WWE will take the bump is to assume they have hit ratings gold, and we can now expect this storyline to continue to soil WWE programming through WrestleMania season.
The saving grace, in the interim: this weekend, we get the two-night Wrestle Kingdom 14 from New Japan to cleanse the palate.
There are no fake weddings on either card.
Story by Chris Graham
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