WWE NXT’s debut on The CW leads to their best audience since Oct. 2023

Last November, WWE announced that their WWE NXT developmental show would leave cable network USA for broadcast network The CW in October 2024. The show premiered there Tuesday, and the ratings were strong relative to what they had been on USA. Here’s more from a release sent out Tuesday:

WWE NXT broadcast television debut on The CW Network delivered the largest audience for the weekly program since October 2023, with 895,000 Total Viewers, up +44% compared to last week’s episode on cable TV. The premiere peaked at 965,000 total viewers from 8:15-8:30 p.m. and was the #1 telecast on The CW this year among adults 25-54 (406,000) and adults 18-49 (354,000).

Fans following WWE NXT’s move to The CW saw Trick Williams regain the NXT Championship and featured guest appearances by WWE Superstars CM Punk, Bianca Belair and Jade Cargill. The episode fueled triple digit increases compared to The CW’s Tuesday primetime season average, up +143% in total viewers, and delivered triple digit increases in total viewers for major markets including New York (WPIX-TV), Los Angeles (KTLA-TV), Dallas (KDAF-TV) and Detroit (WKBD-TV) versus last Tuesday’s primetime programming.

The WWE NXT acquisition is part of a larger sports shift from The CW. That broadcast network has also recently picked up rights to NASCAR (which drew its own strong debut numbers in September), college football (ACC and Pac-2), the Arizona Bowl, college basketball, Inside The NFL, LIV Golf, and more. And while that’s sometimes led to jokes about their past non-sports programming, that hasn’t always worked out well for the trolling teams.

The CW is definitely making its mark in the sports world. And the WWE NXT numbers here are part of that. The note about this being the top telecast in two key advertising demos suggests this is off to a good start for the network.

For WWE NXT itself, there are still grains of salt for this. They did post several strong ratings results on USA this year, including an average of 768,000 viewers for a June 4 episode. This is a jump of almost 200,000 viewers, but broadcast TV is in many more homes than cable: Nielsen estimates 18.1 million homes with over-the-air TV access without a multichannel video programming distributor package for 2023-24, and the actual numbers of those who can get The CW versus USA may be higher considering that USA is not in all packages.

But this is definitely a strong start to WWE NXT‘s The CW era. And we’ll see if they can keep it up. AA’s Chris Novak previously suggested the key there will be sticking to their identity of internal continuity and development for the main roster. It will be interesting to see if WWE NXT does that in the weeks and months ahead, or if this move comes with content changes as well.