By Jason Powell, ProWrestling.net Editor (@prowrestlingnet)
The AEW Rampage television show delivered 461,000 viewers for Friday’s episode on TNT, according to Showbuzzdaily.com. The number was down from the 528,00 viewership count from the previous week.
Powell’s POV: Rampage finished 14th in Friday’s cable ratings with a 0.12 rating in the 18-49 demographic, down from the previous week’s 0.17 rating in the same demo. The August 20, 2021 edition of AEW Rampage delivered 1.129 million viewers and a 0.53 rating in the 18-49 demographic for CM Punk’s return to pro wrestling.
Pretty sure there was NFL football on which may have affected the ratings, but although I’m a huge fan of AEW, they need to do something…Smackdown’s rating was up, and some of the markets preempted that show due to the game on Fox.
Even if one of the three games was nationally televised with how boring NFL pre-season football has become since they went to three games instead of four it can’t be considered competition or something that would take away ratings. Almost none of these teams play their starters anymore; even for pre-season I am anticipating Vikings games but I could barely stand to watch a quarter of both teams just going through the motions with second string guys and others that won’t even make the team. They played harder in the joint practices.
Rampage needs to put on a consistent show on each week with meaningful storyline moments and their upper-tier talent featured rather than rotate between one good week and then two blah ones. Otherwise they are headed into a reputability of WCW Thunder. We don’t need two existing AEW Dark show variants and also one AEW “Slightly More Bright”.
Doesn’t matter which players do or don’t appear doesn’t matter. NFL preseason games still pull good ratings. The two games last Friday pulled 985k and 718k on NFL Network and that doesn’t take into account any local networks. The week before both Friday games were well over 1 million and the top game was that Saturday pulling over 2 million viewers on NFL Network.