The new power night of pro wrestling programming on Destination America debuted Wednesday night, with Ring of Honor leading in to TNA Impact Wrestling. The numbers are in, and the first week didn’t go all that well.
Ring of Honor drew 163,000 viewers in the 8 p.m. Eastern hour and 110,000 viewers in the 11 p.m. replay for a total of 273,000 viewers, according to Show Buzz Daily. TNA Impact Wrestling had 297,000 viewers in the 9-11 p.m. Eastern time slot and 72,000 in the midnight-2 a.m. replay slot for a total of 359,000 viewers.
This week marked the first for TNA in the new Wednesday time slot after running on Destination America on Fridays. The final TNA Impact on Friday, last week, drew a combined 570,000 viewers.
The combined viewership for Ring of Honor and TNA on Wednesday night, ostensibly a better night with the overall TV viewing audience larger on a weeknight as opposed to a weekend night, was up only slightly from what TNA did by itself on its final Friday airtime.
That’s the bad first return for Destination America, which is banking on having Ring of Honor and TNA play off each other to bring in a large segment of wrestling fans as viewers.
The bad first return for TNA is that its viewership was down 35 percent from last week, and about a third of what it was getting at the end of its run on Spike TV. TNA Impact Wrestling drew 980,000 viewers in its final broadcast on Spike TV on Nov. 19, 2014.
Ring of Honor, likely, considers its first week a success. Its shows being run on Destination America have already run on Sinclair stations over the weekend before they get to DA, so they’re already essentially repeats, and the ROH show was still able to run neck-and-neck with TNA the first week out.
– Story by Chris Graham
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