Eric Bischoff Says AEW Has "Flatlined" Over The Past Year
Ex-WCW boss Eric Bischoff on AEW's "flatlined" progress in 2020 and 2021.
Former WCW executive and AEW guest star Eric Bischoff spoke on All Elite's "flatlining" progress on the latest episode of his 83 Weeks podcast, saying that while Tony Khan's promotion is doing a good job of marketing itself, particularly outside of wrestling, viewership has stagnated over the past year.
Bischoff brought up comments Chris Jericho made in 2011, when 'Le Champion' suggested TNA needed to switch things up to elevate its product. Those words, Eric claimed, could now come back to haunt Jericho:-
“I think it’s going to come back to bite him in the ass is what I think. AEW last week they did about 800,000 viewers, they opened the door with 1.5 million viewers and haven’t been able to crack 1 million since or if they have it’s been only on 1 or 2 occasions. They’ve essentially flatlined at 7 or 800,000 viewers on average for the last year and a half. That’s an observation that could, unless something turns around in the next 18 months, come back to haunt someone like Chris. Quite frankly, AEW has flatlined and it’s been that way essentially for a year."
An interesting soundbite, but let's fact-check it for a second.
Network officials reportedly projected Dynamite scoring around 500,000 viewers and a 0.20 rating in the 18-49 demographic at launch. Continually outdoing these numbers led to the new $175 million deal with TNT in January 2020. Additionally, viewership and P18-49 have never fallen below target levels.
Dynamite was also the only major weekly wrestling show to demonstrate palpable growth on a year-by-year basis between mid-November 2020 and mid-January 2021, posting a 20% increase in P18-49 and around half that in P2+ while Raw, SmackDown, and NXT all declined.
On the other hand, that ratings are somewhat down on 2020's numbers over the past few weeks supports Bischoff's argument. He's also right when he says that Dynamite has only broken 1 million viewers once since the new toy feel wore off after the first few episodes. Whether or not this should matter when the show's initial target was half that number is debatable, though.
Either way, with clear wins over WWE NXT every week since 18 December 2019 and regular top 10 cable finishes, it's safe to say that AEW and TNT are probably quite happy with how things are going.