The Wednesday Night Wars were resurrected for one night only on Tuesday. Due to the MLB playoffs, All Elite Wrestling pivoted its flagship show, AEW Dynamite, to Tuesday at 8 PM ET on TBS. This ran opposite WWE NXT, which also airs on Tuesdays at 8 PM ET on the USA Network. Both companies stacked their respective shows, with AEW putting on four title matches for just the second time in their televised history. On the WWE side, NXT welcomed main roster stars like Raquel Rodriguez, The Judgment Day, Kevin Owens, and the Good Brothers for matches and segments throughout the broadcast.
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“It’s important for us to be the most-watched wrestling show,” AEW President Tony Khan said in an interview earlier this week. “We want to maintain the great audience we consistently have on Wednesdays and bring it to this one-time-only Tuesday special. We want to be the number-one wrestling show this week on Tuesday.”
As reported by Brandon Thurston of Wrestlenomics, AEW Dynamiteย did 752,000 viewers while WWE NXT brought in 676,000. In the 18-49 demographic, AEW pulled a 0.26 and came in at #8 for cable originals while WWE drew a 0.18 and landed at #12 in cable originals.ย
This was the first time that AEW and WWE went head-to-head since April 2021. Their last time running simultaneously on Wednesdays saw NXT top Dynamite in viewership, but AEW drew a higher rating in the 18-49 demographic. While that particular broadcast was close, history was much kinder to AEW when it came to the viewership battle. In their 75 weeks of running in the same time slot, AEW outperformed WWE 63 times in total viewership and 74 weeks in the 18-49 demographic.
WWE Chief Content Officer Paul “Triple H” Levesque has downplayed the “Wednesday Night Wars” between the two promotions last month.
“People put so much pressure on this competitive war. It never was that,” Triple H said. “They beat our developmental system, good for them.”
This contradicted a statement that WWE made when AEW first premiered its weekly broadcast opposite NXT in October 2019.
“Congratulations to AEW on a successful premiere,” WWE wrote in a statement. “The real winners of last night’s head-to-head telecasts of NXT on USA Network and AEW on TNT are the fans, who can expect Wednesday nights to be a competitive and wild ride as this is a marathon, not a one-night sprint.”
AEW Dynamite returns to its regular time slot next Wednesday, October 26th.
