At least for one week, Cody Rhodes’ torn pec was best for business

Raw won’t completely miss the NBA finals — with the Golden State/Boston series tied at a game a piece, there’s guaranteed to be a Game 5 next Monday. But they did miss them this week, and coming off a well-received Hell in a Cell show with lots of buzz surrounding Cody Rhodes, that gave the June 6 episode its best television numbers since April.

This week’s offering from WWE’s red brand had an average audience of 1.87 million and a .52 rating among 18-49 year olds. As you not doubt guessed by the “best since April” tease, those were way up from Memorial Day’s numbers: 25% and 24%, respectively.

The hourly breakdown shows that viewers tuned it at the start, which isn’t unusual, but in this case can also probably be attributed to Rhodes and his torn pec. But they also hung around, with the demo peaking in the second hour as it often does in the summer months.

Here’s the break down for total viewers and 18-49:

Hour One: 1.95 million / .51
Hour Two: 1.90 million / .54
Hour Three: 1.77 million / .50

Those numbers gave WWE and USA the second highest rated show on television Monday night. Only a very good hockey game on TNT beat Raw among 18-49 year olds. The Colorado Avalanche finishing off their sweep of the Edmonton Oilers in an overtime thriller drew an audience of 1.99 million and scored a .66 in the demo.

It’ll be tough to keep this momentum going next week against Warriors/Celtics, but John Cena is coming the week after that, so things should be looking up as he head toward SummerSlam.

For complete results and this week’s Raw live blog click here. To read a recap & review of the night’s events click here. For video highlights of the show click here.

Numbers via Showbuzz Daily