We can’t say Smackdown Live is doing worse, nowadays. It is trying to give us some good matches on a weekly basis. Especially after Paige became the general manager of the show, she tried to deliver the very best on a weekly basis.
But it seems like is still not favouring the show. At least the current TV ratings suggest the complete otherwise.
Monday Night Raw has always been the A-show of the WWE. The company always wanted the norm to remain the same way even after the brand extension draft. The treatments to these two shows clarify that WWE wants to portray Smackdown as the B-show. So despite the creative team’s effort, the show is lacking to come up with good TV ratings.
Reports say this past episode of Smackdown Live witnessed a huge downfall concerning ratings. In fact, it was the worst since the show switched to Tuesday Nights from its earlier schedule of Thursday Nights on the USA Network. The last time, such fall was witnessed was in the fall of 2016.
Here are the updates from SportsKeeda.com,
“This past week (July 3rd) show of SmackDown had just 2.013 million viewers, just a few thousand more than the lowest figure in SmackDown history since moving to Tuesday nights which was 1.921 million viewers on November 8th, 2016 show.”
TV ratings going downwards for Smackdown Live is not something new. We have been witnessing this since the Wrestlemania season. The post-Mania episode in New Orleans, Louisiana was the highest recorded viewers (2.952 million). It continued decreasing from then onwards and kept an average of 21 to 2.3 million viewers.
But this past week’s edition from Omaha, Nebraska witnessed even worse regarding ratings. We did not expect this to happen considering that it was a special Independence Day celebration. Team Hell No was back in action in the WWE after five years. Jeff Hardy threw a United States Open challenge to entertain the fans, too.
All of these failed to pull up the ratings of Smackdown Live. It looks like that limited working of AJ Styles affected the brand a lot. The reigning champion had occasional appearances and matches on the show during his entire reign.
Although he was back onboard from Australia tour, he failed to create a big impact. Hopefully, the scenario improves on the go-home episode for Extreme Rules, this week.