A look at the rating and ranking for last night’s SmackDown Live!

Over the two weeks where Monday Night RAW gave us pre-taped episodes taking place on the eve of holidays, the red brand’s ratings took a pretty big hit. Meanwhile SmackDown Live was also pre-taped and fell on those holidays, yet didn’t see as bad of a dip.

Last week, the numbers went down for the blue brand however, although it was their first live episode in weeks (check out last week’s numbers here). The numbers are in for this week’s follow-up and with RAW once again showing significant improvement (more on that here), SmackDown Live has gone back up some with a 2.143 rating, increasing 5.46%. Here’s the last four weeks of ratings for the blue brand:

• December 25th: 1.904
• January 1st: 2.091
• January 8th: 2.032
• January 15th: 2.143

When it comes to the Cable Top 150 Rankings for the 18-49 demographic this week, RAW dominated while SmackDown Live has moved up a couple of spots from last week to number two. However, their share of the demographic actually decreased ever so slightly by .01. Here is Tuesday night’s top five:

1. The Curse Of Oak Island – History – 0.74
2. SmackDown Live – USA Network – 0.70
3. The Haves And Have Nots – Oprah Network – 0.39
4. The Rachel Maddow Show – MSNBC – 0.38
5. Body Cam – Investigation Discovery – 0.35

EA’s Take: Most weeks you will catch me trumpeting the fact that week-in and week-out, SmackDown Live has been more consistently the better product than Monday Night RAW. This week, that’s not the case and I don’t think it’s even close. Outside of the incredible Rey Mysterio vs. Andrade match, the blue brand offered nothing that I was interested in. There’s no excuse for it either coming off of pretty hot episode of RAW. I think at this point we can say that as wrestling fans, SmackDown Live is still the better show. However, it very obviously takes more than that to pull in casuals and get the blue brand to beat out RAW.