By James Caldwell, PWTorch assistant editor

TNA Impact on Thursday, January 17, 2013 scored a 1.15 rating, see-sawing back to a mid-1.1 rating that the 1.3.13 episode drew. Last week's show scored a 1.02 rating.

Impact's heavily-promoted wedding show drew 1.6 million viewers, essentially even with the lesser-promoted January 3 episode. Last week's show drew 1.3 million viewers.

On cable TV Thursday night, Impact ranked #26 in overall viewers, but a distant #37 among males 18-34 and #21 among males 18-49. The m18-34 ranking was lower than last week's show.

Males 18-34 was poor on Thursday night, with Impact scoring the lowest rating in the demo in more than two months. The first live Bellator show that followed Impact drew 41 percent fewer viewers, but out-drew Impact in the m18-34 demo.

Overall, Bellator drew a 0.9 rating and averaged 940,000 viewers. The demos were strong among males 18-34 and average among males 18-49.

Caldwell's Analysis: Average, at best, performance for an episode that TNA hyped throughout the week. It's clear the Hogan wedding angle (a) did not grow the male audience and (b) actually turned away some of the key male audience. Bellator benefited from the Impact lead-in, but it's not clear yet what, if any, benefit there is to TNA from the pairing, especially moving up one hour to make room for Bellator on Thursday nights. King Mo's debut a few months ago did not draw a new audience to Impact since King Mo has little name value to general wrestling fans; it's up to TNA to create that interest, not assume it's automatic. Essentially, this is a Spike project to bring back MMA, and use their top-performing show to lead into MMA fight cards.

Meanwhile, TNA continues to struggle to retain key males by focusing the promotion on older acts. As has been said for years, their future success - being able to sustain and grow a mid-1.1 rating instead of see-sawing back to a 1.0 every other week - depends on developing one or two new, centerpiece stars who will appeal to 18-34-year-olds.

Just looking back to one year ago this week, Impact drew a 1.19 rating on January 19, 2012. Their m18-34 rating was up 36 percent compared to this week and their m18-49 rating was up 16 percent compared to this week.

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