This week’s Raw was probably the best of the year thus far. It felt so different from your average Raw, you have to wonder if Vince somehow got on the wrong plane on the way to the show. New faces being pushed, the perfectly handled debut of Sami Zayn and the introduction of some actual unpredictability to the main-event scene! In so many ways, the show veered right when it usually would have veered left.
Of course, whenever WWE does something good, they shake things up, and you start to worry about how the audience will respond. The best episodes of Raw often don’t get the best ratings, which is then used as an excuse to return to the same old, same old.
Well, the bad news is that this week’s episode of Raw garnered the lowest audience of the year, pulling in an average of just 3.57 million viewers. That’s a kind of scary low number. Taking holiday episodes out of the running, that’s the least-viewed episode of Raw since 1997. Part the issue was the NBA playoffs, although they weren’t wildly popular by any means (they drew around 4.5 million viewers).
The one bright spot was that the show retained it’s viewership fairly well. The first hour did around 3.4 million viewers, the second hour did 3.7 million, and the last hour did 3.6 million. Basically, the few people who did show up to watch the show were entertained and stuck around. Hopefully the lesson WWE takes from Monday’s numbers isn’t “The ratings were terrible! Back to the status quo!” because it should be “Thank God the show was good. The ratings would have otherwise been even worse. We need more shows like this to staunch the bleeding!”
Yeah, the latter is a long shot, but you gotta stay positive.
