AEW Rampage last Friday draws lowest viewership yet for episode featuring Danielson vs. Nick Jackson, Evans vs. Cassidy in hair match, but key demo ranks high

AEW Rampage last Friday (10/1) drew an average viewership of 622,000 viewers, the lowest for the series yet in the 10-11 ET hour that immediately followed WWE Smackdown on Fox and well below the prior week’s 727,000 viewers for the first hour of the “Grand Slam” expanded edition. (Last week’s second hour of Rampage from 11-12 ET drew 522,000 viewers.) The show was featured a Bryan Danielson vs. Nick Jackson match and Jack Evans vs. Orange Cassidy in a hair match.

Excluding the C.M. Punk debut episode, which averaged 1.129 million viewers (an outlier), Rampage has averaged 688,000 live and same-night viewers since its Aug. 13 debut. During that same seven week stretch, also excluding the outlier episode of Dynamite on Sept. 8 which averaged 1.319 million viewers (an outlier featuring the debut of Bryan Danielson and Adam Cole), Dynamite has averaged 1.110 million viewers. That’s a difference of 422,000 total viewers on average

It drew a 0.25 rating in the 18-49 demographic, which was the third best on cable on Friday night, so it’s still a well-performing show for TNT in that tougher late Friday night timeslot. Average viewership, though, was barely more than half of Dynamite’s viewership the prior week, with an 18-49 demo rating 45 percent lower.

The seven-day viewership for the first hour of the “Grand Slam” episode last week came in at 984,000, ahead of 917,000 and 900,000 the prior two weeks. That closes the percentage gap between AEW Dynamite and AEW Rampage, but there are still around 400,000 fewer viewers for the Friday show than the Wednesday show. A gap was always expected between Dynamite and Rampage given the later timeslot and worse night for young male viewership in general on cable.