Last night’s episode of SmackDown on Fox was billed as the show’s season premiere — but that didn’t seem to help the ratings as overnight viewership for the show was the lowest in a month.
The season premiere episode, which was headlined by Roman Reigns defending his Universal Championship against Braun Strowman, averaged 1.987 million viewers in the overnight ratings. Although ratings are not currently available for the two MLB League Championship Series games that aired opposite SmackDown on TBS and FS1, it’s likely those games took away viewers from what was a relatively loaded up show that also featured The New Day’s farewell match after being split up in the WWE Draft and Daniel Bryan’s return to WWE television.
SmackDown’s audience was remarkably consistent with hour one averaging 1.978 million viewers and hour two averaging 1.995 million.
In the 18-34 demo, SmackDown tied the worst rating it’s ever done on Fox in that category with a 0.2 rating. That tied several other shows for the best mark on network television.
In 18-49, SmackDown was down 16.7 percent from last week, averaging a 0.5 rating. That finished second on the networks, trailing ABC’s Shark Tank, which averaged a 0.6.
Comparing the numbers to the same week last year, SmackDown was down 17.8 percent in overnight viewership. It was down 60 percent in 18-34 and 28.6 percent in 18-49.
Next Friday’s SmackDown will air on FS1 due to game three of the World Series being on Fox.
Here’s a look at the last 10 weeks of overnight viewership as well as key ratings demos for SmackDown: