SmackDown ratings were up four percent coming off Sunday’s SummerSlam pay-per-view. Tuesday night’s show averaged 2.164 million viewers on the USA Network, which was the highest viewership for SmackDown since the April 16 Superstar Shake-up episode.
SmackDown finished seventh for the night on cable in terms of total viewers, trailing news-related programming on FOX News and CNN. It did finish first in the 18-49 demo with a 0.67 rating. That rating also beat major network programming for the night on CBS and FOX.
Year-over-year, SmackDown was only down five percent — but SummerSlam took place earlier than usual this year. The 2018 post-SummerSlam episode did 2.437 million viewers, so it was down 14 percent from that.
SmackDown retained 79 percent of the Raw audience from Monday, a slightly lower percentage than usual.
Miz & Mrs, which followed SmackDown on USA, averaged 1.009 million viewers. That was down five percent from last week but still the second highest total of the current run of episodes.
Here’s a look at the last 10 weeks of SmackDown numbers as compared to the same week in 2018: