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What's the story?
The ratings are in for this week's edition of SmackDown Live thanks to PWInsider, and they're not pretty ahead of a pay per view. The October 3rd edition of the show drew 2.323M viewers on the Tuesday before Hell In A Cell.
In case you didn't know...
SmackDown Live last topped the 3 million mark for viewers on April 11, 2017. This was the Tuesday after WrestleMania edition of the show from Brooklyn, New York.
The heart of the matter
The WWE lost over 220k viewers from the past week as the ratings on the September 26th edition of SmackDown Live were at 2.542M. It is the lowest rating for the show in nearly four months as on the June 13th edition of SmackDown Live, the viewership was only at 2.072M.
The show last night had four matches, but two of them were very short in the case of Bobby Roode decimating Mike Kanellis and Randy Orton dropping Aiden English with an RKO.
There were fireworks at the end of the show when Shane McMahon came out to have a face to face with Kevin Owens. When Owens didn't want to get into the ring, Shane took the fight to Owens on the arena concourse, but Owens would sneak attack Shane, sending him through a merchandise table.
Owens would make his way back to the ring to "talk smack" about Shane, but a beaten Shane would return to the ring only to suffer a Pop-Up Powerbomb and a headbutt similar to the one Owens gave to Shane's father Vince.
What's next?
SmackDown Live's next PPV is this Sunday on the WWE Network. Hell In A Cell will feature two main events. The aforementioned Owens v. Shane match, as well as Shinsuke Nakamura challenging Jinder Mahal for the WWE Championship.
Author's take
In my opinion, SmackDown Live is usually the better show than Monday Night Raw, but not this week. The spark just wasn't there on Tuesday night; where there were several great moments on this week's edition of Raw.
I will say that the end of SmackDown Live was great this week as they build towards the Hell In A Cell match with Kevin Owens and Shane McMahon. That entire segment was well done in my opinion and set the table nicely for one of the main events.
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