Last night’s episode of Raw was a historic one, but not in a good way.
The episode, which featured a WWE Championship match contract signing, Andrade vs. Apollo Crews, and the return of Jinder Mahal, drew an average of 1.82 million viewers over its three-hour run time, according to Showbuzz Daily. Raw’s viewership has been under two million for the past few weeks of empty Performance Center shows, but this was a notably low number. 411Mania points out that this was Raw’s smallest live cable audience for a non-holiday episode ever. It’s also the second smallest in the program’s history, only beaten, so to speak, by the Christmas Eve 2018 episode, which drew 1.78 million viewers.
However, the first two hours of Raw were still the second and third highest rated hours of programming on cable last night, while the third hour came in seventh. Shows on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC had up to millions of more viewers, but WWE beat everything but Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta among 18-49-year-olds. Raw’s highest-rated hour was rated 0.56 with that demographic and its lowest an 0.43. However, Raw was most watched by viewers over the age of fifty, with whom it was rated 0.92 for the first two hours and 0.82 for the third.