What’s the story?
According to Wrestling News World, this week’s SmackDown Live drew the most viewers since the WWE brand split episode in July of 2016. The show featured night two of the WWE Superstar Shake-up.
In case you didn’t know...
For years, SmackDown has been considered the “B” show by the WWE and WWE fans. When the brands first split in 2002, both SmackDown and Monday Night Raw were heralded as equal brands. With each passing year, SmackDown underwent roster alterations, changes in its weekly broadcast timeslot, and changes to which channel it aired on.
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All of that led to droves of viewers tuning out, which forced WWE to utilise it strictly as an enhancement television show for Raw. In 2016, the WWE decided to try again with two separate brands, only this time SmackDown would truly be an equal to Raw in that it would air live, just like its Monday counterpart.
This was a major move for the WWE that year and for the SmackDown brand as a whole.
The heart of the matter
This week’s SmackDown Live episode and part two of the WWE Superstar Shake-up drew 3,105,000 viewers. That is up from last week’s 2,885,000 viewers and is the highest drawing episode since the brand split draft episode back in July of 2016. That episode drew 3,170,000 viewers.
The impact
This is a big deal for the WWE. Certainly, the show did well because of the fact that it was night two of the Superstar Shake-up and fans wanted to see which stars from the red brand would end up on SmackDown.
That said, with half of the shake-up occurring on Raw, it wasn’t hard to guess the stars who would join the blue brand. What this show had was a host of on-the-cusp stars that fans want to see.
Not nostalgia acts or part-timers, but current stars. The show featured top-tier talents like Kevin Owens, Sami Zayn, Charlotte, AJ Styles, and Shinsuke Nakamura. These numbers prove that these new acts draw and they draw well.
Author’s take
With this current roster, if the SmackDown Live weekly viewership number can keep growing, maybe Vince McMahon will finally get the picture and listen to fans in regards to who he pushes. Raw is a mess because a guy like Roman Reigns gets pushed as a top babyface when he never receives a reaction from the audience that would yield such a push.
It renders that show to be a confusing program on a weekly basis. Since the split, SmackDown Live has been the polar opposite. It’s been booked properly with the right guys on top that the fans have shown they want to see.
If guys like AJ, Nakamura, and Owens can prove they can regularly draw on their own without a Roman Reigns on the program, maybe Vince will finally see their real potential. Long term, that’s the hope. In the short-term, it’s clear we simply have a show that will be a helluva lot of fun to watch.
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