This might put to rest whatever talk remained of WWE potentially moving Smackdown to Tuesday nights.
The ratings are in for this past Tuesday night's (Feb. 21, 2012) live edition of WWE Smackdown, which was billed as a "Supershow," and they're a disaster, to say the least.
WWE's live Super Smackdown episode on Tuesday, February 21 scored a 1.67 rating, down 14 percent from the most-recent Friday episode on February 17 and down 22 percent compared to Smackdown's recent hot streak on Friday nights.
Smackdown averaged 2.33 million viewers, the fewest viewers for a first-run Smackdown since New Year's Eve 2010 (Dec. 31, 2010) with 2.21 million viewers. Other than NYE 2010, it was the fewest viewers ever for an episode of Smackdown on Syfy.
That's depressing but shouldn't be altogether surprising. After all, the decision to run a live Smackdown this week put live WWE programming on three nights in a row, with the Elimination Chamber pay-per-view on Sunday, Raw on Monday and Smackdown the following day. That may have sounded like a solid idea in theory but in practice, it clearly didn't work.
That and the fact that viewers are trained to look for Smackdown on Friday nights.
What makes it sad isn't the fact that viewers missed out on a great show, because that wasn't necessarily the case, but they definitely missed out on an awesome main event match between CM Punk and Daniel Bryan. It was pay-per-view quality stuff being given away on free TV in a scenario made to draw few viewers.
Expect the replay tomorrow night to do much better.
For complete results and a running live blog from Smackdown click here.