The ratings are in for this past Tuesday night's (Nov. 29, 2011) live "Holiday Special" episode of WWE Smackdown, which featured Mick Foley as Santa Clause and Mark Henry defending his world heavyweight championship against Daniel Bryan in a steel cage match.

And the numbers look good. PWTorch with the word:

WWE's live Super Smackdown episode on Tuesday, November 29 scored a 2.00 rating, up from the past three taped episodes on Friday nights (1.87, 1.99, and 1.95). It was down compared to the previous live Smackdown special on August 30 that scored a 2.11 rating.

Smackdown averaged 3.05 million viewers, which was slightly above the Friday night range the previous three weeks. It was below the Aug. 30 live special that averaged 3.20 million viewers.

There was plenty of dissension here on Cageside Seats regarding the nature of this show. I felt it was a silly, goofy waste of time, while others found it campy fun and called me a Grinch. That may be so and I may very well be that at times but I just couldn't get behind the lack of anything meaningful on a two-hour live show that normally blows away Raw week after week. Maybe I should have tempered my expectations a bit.

The good news, of course, is that the ratings didn't reflect my opinion being shared amongst the masses. The bad news, however, is that they weren't up in any meaningful way from what Smackdown typically does on Friday night's, meaning a permanent move to Tuesday's with a live format wouldn't make a whole lot of sense, despite the coming competition from UFC early next year.

For complete results from Smackdown this past Tues. click here. And for my reactions, which were widely panned, click here.