So here we are, back to ratings talk.  Why?  Because things have gotten extra stupid over the past few weeks. It started off with two excellent weeks for AEW Dynamite where they rolled out Shaquille O’Neal to start hyping a future match, had a World Title match where Kenny Omega defeated Jon Moxley to become champion and revealed his alliance with longtime friend and Impact Wrestling producer Don Callis, and gave us the surprise return of Sting to pro wrestling on TNT where he used to star on WCW Monday Nitro in a truly magical moment.  The numbers soared, dwarfing rival NXT on USA and prompting that esteemed journalist Bryan Alvarez to tweet that NXT was ‘in the mud’.  Now why someone who does not work for AEW would be tweeting so triumphantly to provoke people is beyond me, but that’s what he does.  But he didn’t stop there; he felt the need to share with us that last week’s AEW Dynamite did better ratings demo numbers than Monday Night Raw did this week.  Never mind that Raw was up against Monday Night Football and an address by President-Elect Biden while Dynamite was up against…….the usual Wednesday night cable fare that it faces every week.  But he was not done, because then this past Monday night happened.

This Tuesday may have been the peak for stupidity in wrestling ratings talk.  You see, RAW had it’s ‘worst night ever’ and that launched a thousand bad takes from Alvarez to damn near every clickbait site to random people on Twitter.  Alvarez gleefully guessed that Dynamite this week would beat all three hours of RAW since the total viewership number was so low this week.  And then………plans changed, I guess.  Dynamite fell from 995,000 viewers to 806,000 this week and more importantly dropped hard in the demo numbers, so hard that all three hours of the Worst Ever Raw audience number rated better.  So now for this week at least Bryan Alvarez is, in his words, in the mud.  And completely by his own doing!  But this week should have demonstrated once and for all the sheer stupidity of both Wrestling Twitter and narrative pushing buffoons like Alvarez and his boss Dave Meltzer when it comes to the subject of TV ratings.

There are a few rules that always apply to ratings talk.  Here they are:

1. Most of the people who make hay about them are lying, ignorant, or both
2. 90 percent of the ratings related tweets are people trolling for engagement
3. What actual TV people say matters, not dirtsheet writers
4. If you spend a whole day tweeting about ratings you’re a dork
5. Ratings are not a reflection of quality (see cable news)

Now let’s look at these ‘worst ever’ numbers.  For each of it’s three hours RAW did 1.627 million, 1.512 millon, and 1.441 million viewers.  The three hours finished 6th, 10th, and 12th in the cable TV ratings for the night.  It’s the 1.441 that’s getting all the attention.  The Monday night game was a nailbiter that was tied late in the fourth quarter and had a lot of exciting plays.  It was the best Monday night game of the season, easily, and it did 12 million viewers.  The top 3 shows were the game itself, the pregame show on ESPN, and the Sportscenter that immediately followed.  Monday Night countdown, the pre-pregame show, was 9th.  As for the rest of the top 12 four shows on CNN either carrying or talking about Biden’s address were there at 5, 7, 8, and 11.  The only show in the top 12 that wasn’t about football or Joe Biden was Below Deck on Bravo that finished 4th.  By contrast AEW Dynamite finished third on Wednesday night with 806,000 viewers and demo numbers lower than all three hours of RAW.

What does all that mean?  Well, half the total viewers and a lower demo number (.32 for Dynamite vs .44, .42, and .38 for the three hours of RAW) was enough to get them third place on Wednesday whereas on Monday those same numbers would have put them in 16th, and that’s if we’re being generous and saying that they wouldn’t lose any viewers to Monday Night Football (it chops a few hundred thousand off of RAW, no reason it wouldn’t do something proportional to Dynamite).  The short version is that more people watch cable TV on Monday and there’s more competition for viewers right now, so you don’t have to score as high on Wednesday night to finish higher in the ratings.  RAW has been up against the biggest show on all of cable every week, several other shows that feed directly off of it, and the first night of the week for cable news in a year with a pandemic, protest marches galore, and presidential election coverage and still manages to get all three hours in the top 12 every week.  Dynamite runs against………..the third WWE offering of the week, some other standard cable fare, and night three of the weekly news coverage.  So it finishes third but with a smaller audience and demo numbers against far lesser competition.

So what do we take from all this?  The same thing I’ve been telling you to take from it ever since Dynamite went on air, that ratings talk is dumb because every one of these shows from RAW to Dynamite to NXT to Smackdown on Fridays to MLW and Impact Wrestling on their respective channels is doing what their channel needs to do for them.  And that’s all that matters.  I told you before that TNT didn’t have one show that finished in the top 150 on Wednesday night before Dynamite debuted and that all that they needed was to regularly make that list while not costing the network too much money.  I told you that outside of RAW, USA Network had Todd Chrisley and nothing else so as long as NXT charted on Wednesday night at all they’d be safe no matter how they fared against Dynamite.  And finally I and many others here at the Chairshot have told you that as long as RAW remains in the top 5 to 10 every week they are in no danger on Mondays.  Right now there is no evidence of that changing anytime soon so all this Wednesday Night War talk is a bunch of nonsense ginned up by charlatans and people desperately seeking attention on the internet, as is all the gloom and doom on Monday night talk.  It is literally trolling for dollars and traffic.

And now for the last rule on my list.  For years the internet wrestling discourse has gone like this in several places:

1. Dirtsheets/podcasts/YouTube guys rant about how RAW sucks, predict impending doom for WWE
2. Some people disagree
3. Ranters point to ratings as proof that they are indeed right, because if it was so good the ratings wouldn’t be going down
4. Those who disagree try to put things in proper context regarding ratings, and get called WWE stans or bootlickers or enablers
5. Rinse and repeat

Now look, nobody (and I mean nobody) is saying that all three hours of RAW are perfect every week.  It’s a three hour show, it has ups and downs throughout.  But proclaiming that it is terrible and then pointing to declining total viewership numbers, as if those aren’t down for everything  because people don’t watch TV live like they used to, as proof of your take is a joke.    But it speaks to an ongoing issue the IWC displays on an almost daily basis: the need for validation of our fandom.  It’s why so many people use the Attitude Era as a reference point.  It’s not enough for you to watch a show and like it; no, if wrestling is not a topic for common folk to discuss lovingly then they must be doing it wrong.  If it’s not out there at the forefront of pop culture then it’s failing.  No, not really.  When it had it’s biggest footprint you had four of the biggest mainstream attention getters and money draws ever working at the same time – Stone Cold Steve Austin, the Rock, Hulk Hogan, and Randy Savage. They literally had a guy on every Monday who was so talented a performer that he would go on to become the biggest movie star in the country a decade later.  That my friends is what we call an anomaly.

Another thing is that if you go back to whatever period you consider to be the good old days and read what was being said about the WWE (or WWF) then, it’s very similar to what you see being said now.  Dave Meltzer has said or implied that Vince McMahon doesn’t know what he’s doing in 1985, and in 2002, in 2020, and all points in between.  Seriously you can read some of his reports from 2002 and they sound like they were written in 2020.  It’s not uncommon to see people on Twitter pine for the days when things were better in 2016, which is really rich when it’s still fresh in our mind how much people were trashing it then.  Regardless of how good bad the shows really are these guys write and say the same things year in and year out, whether it was the middle of the boom period or the dark times in 2007 after Chris Benoit’s murder/suicide came really close to taking he business down.  The business would so much bigger if Vince didn’t have his head up his ass……pick a year and Dave or one of his contemporaries is saying something like that.  Is that really true though?  Is a clueless man the most successful in the business, or is it just that these gus don’t like what he does?

The reality is more like what we have now.  Everyone knows pro wrestling exists but most people don’t watch it and can’t name but maybe a few people who are active today.  But the major companies can still find avenues to make good money regardless.  WWE is posting higher revenues and profits now than ever.  AEW is on prime time every week on TNT.  Impact’s owners, Anthem, bought a whole TV network (AXS TV) so they had somewhere to broadcast them.  MLW has re-upped and is looking to expand on the BeIn network.  The indie scene was doing well before COVID hit.  So as fans we have little to worry about for the time being, and absolutely nothing to prove.  Ratings in every case are good enough to keep every company on TV, and they all know how to scale their operations to be profitable.  So what are we fighting for?  Do you really need people to co-sign what you watch to feel good about it?  If you do, get some help and learn to accept that you’re a wrestling fan which means you’re a bit of a weirdo by society’s standards.  Deny it all you want but if you got this far then you’ve read over a thousand words about TV ratings numbers for shows about fake fighting.  So yeah, you’re a bit out there just like the guy who wrote it.  But who cares!  Be who you are and enjoy this stuff for once, will ya?