The WWE main roster has been in turmoil as of late, and more and more people are changing the channel. Vince McMahon is throwing his roster under the bus for not being ambitious enough, Raw and Smackdown are being blown away by developmental, and animosity is brewing between the old guard and the new.
WWE’s TLC(S) pay-per-view was a convoluted, retreaded mess, and Raw suffered for it. Monday’s edition of WWE’s flagship show hit its lowest rating since 2012, and the lowest rating for a non-holiday episode in almost 20 years. Open your eyes, somebody.
Via The Observer:
Raw did 3.51 million viewers last night, the lowest rating for the show since a Christmas Eve show in 2012. It was the lowest non-holiday audience for Raw since December 3, 2012, a show that did 3.43 million viewers, and one of the lowest rated non-holiday episodes since 1997.
The number can’t be attributed to the NFL, since the game did 11.07 million viewers, a below average number. Plus it was the day after a PPV show, when the audience, in particular for the first hour, should be way up.
This was a reflection of declining interest in the product.
The three hours were:
8 p.m. 3.70 million viewers
9 p.m. 3.48 million viewers
10 p.m. 3.39 million viewers
Maybe people couldn’t watch because their televisions were exploding?
It’d be foolish of me to say “here’s exactly what you need to do to succeed, multi-million-dollar publicly traded primetime television wrestling company,” but it’d be more foolish of me to smile and clap my hands and say everything’s fine. No matter what the answer is, somebody needs to locate and utilize the damn answer. WWE’s foundation is thriving and their talent base is unimaginable, but no amount of celebrity guest hosts and Flintstones crossovers is gonna make people tune in. Maybe try making the show good, and not thinking so little of your audience that you can do whatever you want and count on them to forget it?
