Since NXT opted to air its Year-End Awards on Jan. 1, this week’s episode marked the Black and Yellow Brand’s first live episode of 2020. And while the show put on some great matches in the Dusty Rhodes Tag Team Classic and a four-way No. 1 contender’s match for the NXT North American Championship, the show struggled mightily to bounce back from last week’s absence. The show finished all the way down at No. 55 on Cable Originals for Wednesday night with a 0.19 rating. However the show’s viewership was back at 721,000, which is right around where they were before the build to the Survivor Series pay-per-view in November.
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Meanwhile AEW Dynamite finished sixth in the cable ratings with a 0.36 in the 18-49 demographic. It also toppled NXT in viewership with 947,000 viewers, just slightly lower than the Jan. 1 episode at 967,000.
While Dynamite had its share of highlights (The Rhodes vs. The Lucha Brothers, Jon Moxley decimating Chris Jericho), it was panned by critics on social media for the segments involving The Nightmare Collective (who interfered heavily in the AEW Women’s World Championship match between Riho and Kris Statlander) and The Dark Order (who tried to recruit Christopher Daniels, got beat up by SCU and The Young Bucks).
Cody Rhodes recently gave an interview with Yahoo Sports where he gave his honest opinion about how much AEW higher-ups concern themselves with NXT’s programming and ratings.
“There’s a romantic way to look at the ratings and say ‘Here we are, it’s the late 1990s again. Every Thursday let’s check ’em,’” Rhodes said. “It’s fun to look at the ratings but I know internally we’re not having any pep rally speeches. Our concern is not NXT and I believe NXT’s concern is not us. If anyone is going to succeed, we cannot be a reactionary brand. One really good, positive takeaway that the ratings war doesn’t show is that there is a lot less crossover between the fan bases, there’s a lot less of the turning the channel between one and the other. That means there’s a lot of people just watching wrestling on Wednesday nights. Making wrestling destination programming again is cool.”
AEW’s next episode of Dynamite will kick off the nine-day Bash at the Beach event. So far the card includes PAC vs. Darby Allin, Statlander & Hikaru Shida vs. The Nightmare Collective and Diamond Dallas Page, Dustin Rhodes & QT Marshall vs. MJF, The Butcher & The Blade.
