10 Highest-Rated AEW Dynamite Episodes So Far
No one aged 18-49 has ever mattered so much...
The depth of quality within the medium of professional wrestling peaked throughout the last two decades, and thus, viewership and ratings matter more than they ever did before.
WWE Monday Night Raw Raw regularly touts a viewership of at least 1.5 million, as does its Friday night counterpart. AEW Dynamite is often near or above the 1 million region. WWE NXT, AEW Rampage, and IMPACT Wrestling all achieve respectable, albeit lower, numbers on a consistent basis.
The importance of such figures has been paramount to wrestling discourse since the succeeding period after 2 October 2019. The launch of AEW Dynamite, a new flagship show designed to act as WWE's first legitimate competition since 2001, came out of the gate strong, boasting 1.409 million viewers for its anticipated debut broadcast and a staggering 0.68 rating in the 18-49 demo. For comparison, WWE NXT drew 891,000 viewers in the same timeslot.
AEW Dynamite - and indeed the promotion as a whole - isn't quite red hot just now; it's still bubbling, but it's just not must-see on a weekly basis. When it was at the top of its game, however, the Wednesday night broadcast boasted some absurdly outstanding wrestling...
10. 23 October 2019 (0.45)
AEW Dynamite's 23 October 2019 broadcast was highlighted by two blistering in-ring affairs and yet, it was a mid-show angle, so atypical of the WWE style, that stole fans' minds.
Cody Rhodes led MJF, Dustin Rhodes, and Diamond Dallas Page into the Inner Circle's skybox, punching through a glass window to reach Chris Jericho. Had the same angle occurred in WWE, Rhodes and Jericho would have stared aimlessly opposite one another with Michael Cole yelling down the headset that the match is free to new subscribers of the WWE Network.
It served as a blissful reminder that AEW was indeed the new kid on the block.
The preeminent in-ring product was an added bonus for those tuning in. Private Party vs. the Lucha Bros was a blinding doubles match that served as an early indication of AEW's love of tag team wrestling, complete with one of Marq Quen's first holy sh*t Shooting Star Presses. Jon Moxley vs. PAC, meanwhile, was a cringe-inducing war, concluding in a time limit draw, a mechanism used only rarely by AEW to heighten drama when required.
An otherwise random episode set between Dynamite's debut and the first post-Dynamite launch pay-per-view, the broadcast was everything expected of the organisation at the time.