Wednesday Night Wars 11/20/2019 Ratings

The numbers were just released, and it has finally happened. NXT finally got its first win in the Wednesday Night Wars during the 8th week of head-to-head competition between WWE's NXT on the USA network and AEW's Dynamite on the TNT network. Boy, Vince McMahon must be crapping in his pants from the excitement right now.

Dynamite slid down slightly while NXT had a nice big bump as it's the go-home show before this weekend's WWE pay-per-view Survivor Series (see graph). Looking at the numbers, Dynamite's audience went down from 957,000 viewers to 893,000 viewers (7.2% decrease) while NXT's went up significantly from 750,000 to 916,000 (22.1% increase). Comparing the two shows, NXT had 2.6% more viewers than NXT. So it was just a narrow victory, but still a victory nonetheless. However, the story is different if you look at the ratings for the coveted 19-49 demographic (which is the demographic most advertisers pay attention to). Dynamite actually still won with a 0.39 rating compared to NXT's 0.3 rating. But technically, this week can still be considered a victory for the WWE.

A reason for NXT's jump is the upcoming Survivor Series pay-per-view as previously mentioned. This is one of the WWE's biggest pay-per-views of the year. But more impactful than that is probably HHH's appearance on WWE's Raw two days ago. On that show, HHH outright invited the Raw and Smackdown roster to invade NXT. So that probably attacted a lot of eyeballs as HHH made it sound like there would be a three-way battle on NXT. This was very obviously a ratings ploy by the WWE. But that's okay, because it worked. And the fans who tuned in were not disappointed. The show featured numerous stars from Raw and Smackdown such as Becky Lynch, Ricochet, and Seth Rollins. Some had actual matches while others did run-in attacks. Either way, the audience was presented with plenty of three way battles as promised.

Over on TNT, this week's edition of Dynamite didn't receive any kind of special boost like last week's episode with the Full Gear fall out. So I am not surprised there was a drop in viewership. The drop was relatively small, though, which suggests that Dynamite is settling into a general range in terms of the number of viewers. As usual, the episode showcased great wrestling matches. It also introduced a couple of new storylines, including a feud between the Inner Circle and SCU. Disappointingly, Cody Rhodes wasn't on the show, so there was no movement on the MJF/Cody Rhodes narrative. However, MJF was built up as we saw him in in-ring action for the first time where he won Dynamite's first battle royal.

My guess is that NXT's numbers won't be as strong next week. Granted that the fall out from Survivor Series will bring some eyeballs, but I doubt the boost will be as big as the one this week's episode received. On the Dynamite side, there is a championship title match scheduled next week between Chris Jericho and Scorpio Sky. That should attract some eyeballs, too. So next week's edition of the Wednesday Night Wars seems to be starting off on equal footing.

NOTE: We have included NXT Backstage into this week's ratings chart. That's because it was the first announced episode with CM Punk, which is very newsworthy due to Punk's and WWE's checkered past. As expected, Punk spoke his mind openly, which is what fans were hoping for. But in spite of that, the show's numbers were not extraordinarily strong, only scoring 180,000 viewers.