Though opening the show with a Brock Lesnar promo helped the 8PM hour improve over recent lows, the balance of Monday’s WWE RAW again underwhelmed from a ratings standpoint.
Despite featuring a lengthy CM Punk-John Cena tease and promo, Lesnar, Jericho’s last match for the foreseeable future, a Shawn Michaels interview and all the Summerslam fallout, Monday’s RAW matched last week’s mediocre 1.6 adults 18-49 rating.
Viewership, however, improved to 4.48 million, thanks in large part to big improvement in the 8PM hour. Kicking the show off with Brock Lesnar and Paul Heyman paid off for WWE, as their segment helped fuel a 4.35 million viewer average at 8PM, a signficant increase from last week’s sub-4 million number.
Unfortunately, the audience did not significantly grow as the show progressed and actually dropped from a 4.66 million viewer average at 9PM to a 4.43 million mean at 10PM. Since the 10PM hour did not go against the kind of intense competition it did during the Olympics, it is hard to view this drop-off as anything but a negative.
Monday’s preseason NFL game was actually down slightly to a 2.0 adults 18-49 rating and 5.07 million viewers, so there was simply no sports-related excuse for the weak performance.