The ratings are in for both AEW Dynamite on TNT and NXT on USA Network, and the number for Oct. 16 tell a similar story to the week before. Dynamite finished with the fifth-highest rating of the night on cable with a 0.44 in the 18-49 demographic and managed to stay above one million viewers at 1.014 million. Meanwhile NXT brought in 712,000 viewers and a 0.20 rating. Both shows dipped slightly in both viewers and ratings, but neither lost more than 100,000 viewers.
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All Elite Wrestling loaded up this week’s episode of Dynamite with two championship matches — AEW World Champion Chris Jericho vs. Darby Allin and AEW Women’s World Champion Riho vs. Britt Baker — two tag team tournament matches and a star-studded tag match involving Jon Moxley, Kenny Omega, Hangman Page and PAC. Meanwhile NXT kept its show simple this week with a few grudge matches — Keith Lee vs. Dominik Dijakovic and Pete Dunne vs. Damian Priest — along with a handful of short matches involving Tommaso Ciampa, Imperium, Io Shirai, Matt Riddle, Tegan Nox and Killian Dain.
AEW has had the ratings advantage over NXT ever since the two started airing two-hour live shows on opposing networks each week on Oct. 2. After pulling in 1.4 million viewers in its first week, AEW received a public statement from WWE congratulating them on their success.
“Congratulations to AEW on a successful premiere,” the statement read. “The real winners of last night’s head-to-head telecasts of NXT on USA Network & AEW on TNT are the fans, who can expect Wednesday nights to be a competitive & wild ride as this is a marathon, not a one-night sprint.”
Moxley, a former WWE Champion and current AEW star, said the statement felt disingenuous during an interview at New York Comic Con.
“So literally the entire industry all over the world is benefiting from the fact that now there’s a viable alternative,” Moxley said. “And once we hit 10 o’clock and we got two hours in the can the other night and we were like, we did it, high five, there and now we got the ratings out, there is a viable alternative. You know what I mean? This is real. This actually happened. I’m sure there are a lot of people that are going to keep wanting to wake up from the nightmare and like, this isn’t really real, but oh, this is happening and this is 100% real.”
“And it’s great for everybody and it’s great most…and I don’t say this to try to do some corporate-speak like that passive-aggressive ass WWE statement the other day,” he added. “But it is, ultimately the fans benefit because they get to see these guys who are, all across the board are more inspired, or from the indies getting hyped up. All across the board, everybody’s more passionate.”
