The road to WrestleMania 41 has gone global as WWE have taken all of their biggest names over to Europe as the anticipation for their biggest event of the year rises. The tour kicked off with the March 14 episode of "WWE SmackDown," the first episode of WWE TV to ever take place in the Spanish city of Barcelona, with the Catalonian crowd getting to see GUNTHER go one-on-one with Spanish native Axiom, Randy Orton defeat Carmelo Hayes, and The Street Profits win the WWE Tag Team Championships.
While the show aired live on Netflix for international viewers, the American audience had to wait for the show to air on the USA Network via tape delay, and according to The Programming Insider, the average number of viewers for the March 14 episode of "SmackDown" was 1,571,000. This is a 10% decrease from the previous week's 1,741,000, and 5% lower than the trailing four week average which current stands at 1,658,000 viewers.
Despite the average number of overall viewers going down, it seems like those that did stick around for the show were in the 18-49 demographic as "SmackDown" posted another 0.52 number. This is the third week in a row that the show has posted that number, which in turn puts this week's episode 4% above the trailing four week average of 0.50, a number that will be guaranteed to rise given "SmackDown's" consistent run of numbers in the demographic.
With that said, one difference between March 14 and the previous week's episode was that "SmackDown" did not rank first for the night across all prime time telecasts. Instead, "SmackDown" would place second for the night, being beaten by the college basketball game between Duke and North Carolina which aired on ESPN, meaning that also took the top spot for cable telecasts as well.
