SmackDown climbs back above two million viewers

After a big drop-off last week, SmackDown bounced back for WWE and Fox on Fri., Sept. 25.

The Clash of Champions go home show averaged 2.03 million viewers across its two hours, up 4% from the Sept. 18 episode. That despite live sports competition from the NHL Finals on NBC and the NBA Playoffs on ESPN. We won’t have numbers from the latter until next week, but SmackDown equalled or outperformed an entertaining Tampa Bay/Dallas hockey game in every metric.

It’s still not up to where the blue brand was before a political bombshell broke its streak of two million-plus audiences last Friday, but it delivered a ratings win for Fox in the 18 - 49 year old demo. That’s probably making network execs and their partners in Stamford pretty happy today.

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):

Heel Roman Reigns seems to have been a good business decision, and speculation on his next move should help draw people to Oct. 2’s PPV fallout episode. We’ll let you know if “should” turns into “did” next weekend.

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.