Talk about going out with a bang. Last Friday's WWE SmackDown episode, which featured the return of John Cena, was the most-viewed episode of the brand in two years.
According to Wrestlenomics, the final WWE SmackDown episode of last year pulled in an average of 2.629 million viewers (up by 10.6% from last week). More importantly, it was the highest-rated episode of SmackDown in over two years. The last time the WWE had such a large audience was the Christmas Day episode back in 2020, but that had an NFL game in the lead-up to the show. If you take the NFL game out of the equation, the December 30, 2022 episode of SmackDown is the largest audience total for the brand since October 11, 2019. Finally, SmackDown was the seventh-highest-rated show on TV on ESPN in the 18-49 demo when John Cena came back.
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