The Wednesday, 7:30 pm airing of The Big Bang Theory on TBS, which serves as AEW Dynamite’s lead-in, has had lower viewership in Q2 and Q3 than in the first three months of the year.
For whatever reason, in Q1, the first quarter that Dynamite was on TBS, the 7:30 pm episode of The Big Bang Theory had higher than normal viewership, which normalized in Q2 and slightly decreased in Q3.
Doing some “Brandon math, ” I can do an eight-week moving correlation coefficient to show that the correlation between The Big Bang Theory lead-in and Dynamite, which was strong throughout the year’s first half, has weakened in recent months.
In other words, viewership for The Big Bang Theory was once a pretty strong predictor of what Dynamite’s viewership would be, especially the first quarter-hour. The results since the summer have been more random.
Sheldon is still a strong performer among reruns, though. Despite lower viewership than previous months, the 7:30 pm airing continues to be one of the most-watched rerun telecasts on cable with viewers aged 18 to 49. We don’t have data for the final week of September yet, but on September 21, the 7:30 pm airing was the most-watched cable rerun of the week in P18-49, according to SpoilerTV. Half of the top 10 reruns that week were Big Bang Theory telecasts, in fact. In both of the two weeks prior, the 7:30 telecast was #2.
Brandon Thurston
brandon@wrestlenomics.com