WWE Firing On All Cylinders Ahead Of SummerSlam With Heavyweight Performances From ‘Raw,’ ‘SmackDown’ & ‘NXT’

WWE fans are gearing up for what could be a very eventful SummerSlam.

Ahead of the event, which is taking place over two nights for the first time, Raw, SmackDown and NXT have all put up strong performances across cable and streaming as viewers tap into the current storylines that are likely to play out over the weekend with nine titles on the line.

On Friday, SmackDown saw its highest total viewership since the pre-WrestleMania episode with 1.71M tuning in, per data from Nielsen. The April 18 show before WrestleMania scored 1.74M, pointing to a fairly consistent trend the audiences prefer to clock back into the franchise before major events.

In fact, the past four weeks (July 4 to 25) marks the most-watched month-long stretch for SmackDown since April 18 to May 9, which encapsulated WrestleMania and its aftermath.

Raw has pretty consistently been performing well since it landed on its new home at Netflix in January, recently marking its 29th straight week on the streamer’s global weekly Top 10 rankings. Each week’s event has hovered at or around 2.7M views (Netflix reports hours viewed divided by runtime) for the past two months or so.

As for NXT, the next-gen program averaged 747,000 total viewers for last week’s show on The CW, which is the highest since February 25, per Nielsen In the 18-49 demo, the episode drew 227,000 viewers, putting up its best performance since post-WrestleMania’s April 22 show.

The first-ever two-night SummerSlam takes place this Saturday and Sunday at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. For those not attending in person, the event streams live in the U.S. on Peacock and internationally on Netflix.