It was a big night on WWE Monday Night Raw this week because it was the fallout from Sunday’s WWE TLC event. That show ended up being pretty historic simply for the fact that it was Kurt Angle’s first WWE match in 11 years after he subbed in for a sick Roman Reigns. Angle led his Shield teammates Seth Rollins and Dean Ambrose to defeat a five man team of heels. Also at TLC,
For Raw this Monday, WWE heavily promoted the return of Universal Champion Brock Lesnar after he was away for the past month following his No Mercy win over Braun Strowman (who was last seen in a garbage truck, by the way). Lesnar was there to accept the challenge of Jinder Mahal for Survivor Series even though Angle already announced the match as being official in the first segment on Raw. It was a weird night, my friends. Paul Heyman mocked Mahal and Lesnar laughed a lot although no confrontation took place.
In terms of the ratings, WWE got great news because they did 2.953 million viewers for the three hour show according to Showbuzz Daily. That is up from the 2.688 million viewers from last week and also bested the 2.871 million viewers from two weeks ago as well.
There was a big difference in the hourly breakdown as well. Normally the third hour is the lowest, but not this much. The first hour did an excellent 3.332 million, which is very good. Anything over 3 million for an hour breakdown is very good. It shows how much interest there was coming out of TLC. The second hour did 2.969 million viewers, which is sold. The third hour was poor, but also consistent with past weeks with 2.557 million viewers. That means there was a nearly 800,000 viewer drop from hour one to hour three. That’s not good at all especially when WWE ran a huge invasion angle to end Raw.
The Monday Night Football game on ESPN with the Philadelphia Eagles beating the Washington Redskins did 11.28 million viewers. That’s around an average number for them.
With the invasion angle taking place this week, there might be more interest in Raw next week. Those viewers that tuned out of the third hour may have caught up visiting WWE’s Youtube page because the clip of the invasion is doing big numbers (over 2 million views in less than 24 hours), so people are probably checking it out. Add in the fact that Lesnar is back and perhaps the build to Survivor Series will do well in terms of keeping viewers interested in Raw.
