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The final episode of SmackDown on FOX aired last week, ending a landmark agreement between FOX and WWE that began in October 2019. The deal called for FOX to pay WWE $205M to air SmackDown each Friday on broadcast television, more than triple what NBCUniversal/USA Network previously paid for SmackDown. The deal was transformative for WWE, essentially making them, for lack of a better term, idiot-proof moving forward.
Things started great for WWE on FOX: the show’s October 4, 2019, debut averaged nearly four million viewers on a loaded show that featured the return of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and a show that promised a new, different era in WWE.
It also featured Brock Lesnar’s absolute destruction of Kofi Kingston and the end of the KofiMania world title reign.
With SmackDown on FOX, the network’s goal would be for the wrestling property to look, feel, and act more like a sports show than a “sports entertainment” show. It could and would be promoted on NFL Sunday as a bridge between sports and entertainment.
Many lauded the four million viewership number, but some brilliant, astute wrestling and sports fans were very worried about it. It was us—Joe and me. The four million was shockingly low given the timeslot on FOX, and we worried about the week-to-week ratings churn if they were starting at such a low figure.
We found out the following week when SmackDown fell by roughly one million viewers on week two, and in week three, they shed another 500,000. Very early in SmackDown’s run on FOX, it consistently hit the 2.2-2.5 million viewers mark.
Even more disappointing was that SmackDown on USA Network routinely hit just over 2 million viewers weekly. This was a “new era” of SmackDown readily available on network TV, reaching far more homes than the USA. SmackDown was given prime advertising slots on NFL Sunday and other FOX Sports broadcasts.
When asked about their expectations, FOX put on a good face and said they were happy with the numbers. As we’d find out in later years, they weren’t. By September 2021, a source at FOX would tell Fightful Select that the SmackDown viewing audience was “disappointing in comparison to expectations.”
Recently, FOX sources have spoken further about their disappointment in WWE’s output, particularly during the final years of Vince McMahon’s tenure: “They didn’t feel like that in 2020 and 2021. They felt, especially under Vince McMahon—some of the last days of that or some of the last years of that—that he was not giving them a lot of what they’d been told.”
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