Last Friday’s episode of WWE SmackDown featured the Trial of the Tribal Chief segment with Roman Reigns, The Usos, Paul Heyman, and Solo Sikoa, which went nearly 40 minutes.
It was a rare lengthy segment on WWE television, but it paid off as the segment continued to increase Smackdown’s ratings, peaking with 3 million viewers.
The show averaged 2.561 million viewers on FOX, and in the all-important 18-49 demographic, the show did a 0.76 rating, the highest key demo viewership since December 2020, when they had a lead-in with an NFL game on Christmas. Excluding that, it was the highest since March 2020.
While speaking on Wrestling Observer Radio, Dave Meltzer noted there was some concern in WWE over the length of the segment.
“They brought that thing up too. Yeah. There was some other stuff too. I mean they, it was interesting because there were a couple of notes on that. Number one is, if there was a lot of concern, you know, debate going in, if going 30 minutes with that segment, you know, 35 minutes was overkill. They did it. And now, with the benefit of hindsight, it wasn’t because the number, you know, grew and grew and grew. And then after that, the rest of the show didn’t do anything special after that. It was just that. And, the other thing was is that Jey Uso’s, the one who’s getting the next title shot at Summerslam, which is a major show, but for the long-term story, I mean, they had solo throw around Jey, throw ’em over the table, you know, destroy ’em and everything like that. Now, Jey did get revenge at the end of the show with the 10-chair shots. But the point is that this was not just, you know, like usually when they have when you got.,” Meltzer stated.
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