SmackDown loses back last week’s viewership gains

SmackDown had competition from not one but two major sports on July 31 - regional baseball broadcasts and the NBA on cable nationwide. But at first glance, it doesn’t seem to have made a huge difference.

The overall viewership number dropped to an average of 1.89 million over its two hours, which is back where it was before the audience increased for the first time in a month last week. The most interesting thing about the number of viewers is the second hour had more than the first, which could be due to the Milwaukee/Boston basketball game ending and folks opting to wait to tune in to the later Houston/Dallas one... but who knows? Maybe Bayley’s a draw.

Ratings were largely flat, but there was an uptick in the 18 - 34 year olds in the first hour, giving Fox a clean win in that demo among broadcast networks.

Here are the fast nationals:

Showbuzz Daily

And here’s our running tracker of every other episode since WWE moved to Fridays last fall (all data via Showbuzz Daily):

The blue brand put together a pretty interesting show last night, at least for my money. Can it build some momentum and get back above two million viewers on the road to SummerSlam?

Join us next week to find out!

For complete results and the live blog for SmackDown this week click here. To read a complete recap & review of all the night’s events click here. For a full playlist of the show click here.