The short-lived Wednesday Night War is returning for one night only, and its going down on a new day of the week. This fall, All Elite Wrestling will air AEW Dynamite on Tuesday, October 18th due to TBS needing the company’s usual Wednesday night time slot for coverage of the MLB playoffs. Roughly a couple channels away on Tuesday nights is WWE NXT 2.0, which has occupied the 8 PM ET time slot on USA Network for nearly a year and a half now. This will mark the first time that AEW Dynamite and NXT have gone head-to-head on television since April 2021, and is the first time overall that AEW has aired simultaneously with the 2.0 version of WWE’s developmental program.
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That said, this won’t be the first time AEW and WWE air broadcasts simultaneously this year. Next month, NXT 2.0 will clash with NXT UK at Worlds Collide, a premium live event airing on Peacock on September 4th. On the same day AEW will produce AEW All Out, their annual Chicago-based pay-per-view at 8 PM ET. While NXT’s show does not have a scheduled start time, history indicates that it will kick off around the same hour.
Coincidentally enough, this upcoming Tuesday Night War will take place almost one year to the day of the last time AEW and WWE went head-to-head. On October 15th, 2021, a special FS1 edition ofย WWE SmackDown ran for an extra 30 minutes, finishing its broadcast at 10:30 PM ET. This meant the final half hour of SmackDown would clash with the first half of AEW Rampage, which occupies the 10-11 PM ET time slot on TNT. While SmackDown topped Rampage in overall viewers, AEW’s product drew a higher viewership in the 18-49 demographic.
AEW President Tony Khan has been very passionate about AEW’s defeat of WWE last October, giving praise to current Lineal AEW World Champion CM Punk for helping boost that rating with his match against Matt Sydal.
“The matches, [CM Punk] carried the Friday Night War, which, by the way, is a matter of record in f–king court in the state of California that we won the Friday Night War,” Khan said at the AEW Double or Nothing post-show press conference this past May. “This guy (CM Punk) won it, vs. Matt Sydal, who is a great wrestler, he had another great match on Friday night. This f–king guy, he f–king did the Friday Night War, he did the First Dance, he’s done the record Double or Nothing.”
As for AEW’s head-to-head history with NXT, the numbers are significantly less disputed. During the time that the two shows aired simultaneously from October 2019 until April 2021, AEW defeated NXT in viewership every single week except for one.
“The only time in the demo, in the Wednesday Night War, which, somebody told me, and it’s good advice, maybe we should make our own documentary of the Wednesday Night War,” Khan said in January. “Like a one-sided documentary. I think it’s a really good idea. We could call it like 76 to 1 or 75 to 1.”
