WWE News: Raw viewership increases with return of The Undertaker and Brock Lesnar

What's the story?

WWE advertised that Brock Lesnar would cash in his Money in the Bank contract this Monday and the fake-out helped the show retain a lot more of the audience. Monday Night Raw averaged 2.40 million viewers and was up significantly from last week's episode on May 27.

In case you didn't know...

Raw dominated Monday night cable for the second week in a row with the return of Lesnar and The Undertaker announced for this week's episode.

The show was built around the potential WWE Universal Championship match between Seth Rollins and Lesnar, but the cash-in match never took place due to Lesnar attacking Rollins and declaring he would claim his title match at WWE Super ShowDown this Friday.

The heart of the matter...

Raw was up 10 percent from last week's show with about 215,000 more viewers watching the go-home show for WWE Super ShowDown.

The following is the hourly breakdown for the June 3 edition of Raw per ShowBuzzDaily:

Hour one: 2.558 million

Hour two: 2.349 million

Hour three: 2.308 million

Raw's first hour started with an exchange of words between Roman Reigns and Shane McMahon, which lead to the opening six-man tag team match between Reigns & The Usos against Drew McIntyre & The Revival.

Lesnar and Paul Heyman arrived about 30 minutes into the show and didn't interact with Rollins until the top of the third hour when he declared that he would cash in his Money in the Bank contract in Saudi Arabia.

Despite the increase in viewers, Raw was down 5 percent from the June 4, 2018 episode which averaged 2.52 million viewers and featured Finn Balor versus Kevin Owens in the main event.

What's next?

Raw's viewership managed to bounce back from their low numbers last week, but next week WWE will be up against Game 5 of the NBA Finals between the Golden State Warriors and the Toronto Raptors. The flagship show hasn't done well against the NBA games and next week's show could see a massive decrease in viewership.