Dave has been crashing out and responding to everyone on X since the ratings reveal but that's his own undoing. I'm actually surprised by NXT's lately. The roster screams Collision numbers and they tried passing Rook off as a star which is insane. They're copying SD by having several involved in the world title scene so maybe that's helping but it's a show no one needs to watch right now.
How fans talk about not missing much if you skip a Raw or SD, the same can be applied to Dynamite and Collision. WWE moves at a snail's pace and in AEW it doesn't matter if you miss a random match between Mox or Ospreay vs Komander or whoever. Most of these shows don't feel important. But AEW is battling NXT numbers wise and that's puzzling. That developmental roster in that same warehouse against AEW's roster with several former WWE stars and it usually does similar numbers. That's wild. Again though, it's why I laugh when Meltzer says Dynamite is close to or is beating Raw and SD. That's crazy talk.
Educate yourself and get a clue.
You're comparing a TV show that's only available in 53.1 million households (both AEW shows) that's also got a bunch of people watching on HBO Max to a TV show that's available to around 125 million households (NXT). And that 53.1 million number is only going to continue to shrink as people continue to get rid of cable/satellite/streaming cable.
There's a reason why the charts are broken up into separate tables for broadcast and cable. There's a reason why when Smackdown or Dynamite ranks # whatever on the night it's always stated as "#1 on the night
on cable." Broadcast TV has a significant advantage in general due to larger audience size. Every home in America with a TV can get it for free, assuming they don't live so far off the beaten path that they can't even pick it up with an antenna.
NXT
should be beating AEW with that kind of numbers advantage. That's why virtually everything on broadcast TV beats virtually everything on cable in terms of total viewers (notable cable exceptions for total viewers being live sports and Fox News). The numbers advantage is overwhelming. It would be like a basketball team with five players on the court going up against one with only 2 players on the court. If the 5-man team can't beat the 2-man team then that's pretty embarrassing.
And yet despite that numbers advantage they still lose to Dynamite basically every week in both total viewers and the demo - and CW is a network that heavily caters to the demo-aged audience! - even when not including HBO Max numbers.
So Dynamite does significantly better than NXT in relation to percentage of available homes watching. NXT's USA ratings were far more impressive, and normally bigger at that, than what they are doing on CW. Which is frankly pathetic. Dynamite almost always ranks in the top 5-10. It's now back to it being somewhat common for it compete for the top 1-2 spots, or at least the top 1-2 spots outside of live sports, based on the demo, which is what the rankings are based on.
Even though NXT is a high performer
for CW, it on average ranks in the bottom 15-20 original weekly shows on broadcast TV, regularly only beating out other CW content. Most weeks it ranks worse than every original broadcast (as in not a repeat) from Fox, ABC, NBC, and CBS. The worst performing show on from those four networks for the 2025-26 season did an average of 638K. The second worst did 825K. 107 of 124 broadcast network shows averaged over a million for the season. I don't think NXT has even once gotten close to a million viewers on CW.
Dynamite would be beating the breaks off of NXT if we had real HBO Max numbers while it consistently ranks somewhere around #5 or higher on its night. Collision doesn't stand much of a chance for ranking high on Saturdays for numerous reasons, some of which are very much self-inflicted while the worst problems are entirely out of their control (Saturday nights are just bad for a weekly program).
