Image: WWE
Going up against the opening round of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament on CBS and various cable channels, last night’s Fastlane go-home edition of SmackDown averaged 1.946 million viewers in the fast nationals, the show’s lowest total in more than a month.
It’s likely that daylight savings time played a part in this as well as the first hour averaged just 1.868 million viewers, one of the lowest hours for SmackDown since the show moved to Fox. SmackDown climbed to 2.023 million viewers in the second hour, a much larger than usual increase of 8.6 percent.
As usual, Fox finished last among the major networks in terms of total viewership. But Fox was closer to the other stations this week with the heavy sports competition. A repeat of NBC’s Blacklist and the second hour of ABC’s 20/20 virtually tied SmackDown’s second hour.
In the 18-49 demo, SmackDown drew the same 0.5 overnight rating it has in four of the last five weeks. That beat everything else on the networks except college basketball.
In 18-34, SmackDown drew a 0.3 rating. It’s the 11th time in 12 weeks that SmackDown has drawn that number in the fast nationals. That was also second on the networks behind college basketball.
Year-over-year, SmackDown was down 24.1 percent in viewership, 33.3 percent in the 18-49 demo, and 50 percent in 18-34. It should be noted that last year’s NCAA tournament was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Here’s a look at overnight viewership and key demo ratings for SmackDown over the last 10 weeks: