WWE Tribute to the Troops aired on Saturday afternoon on Fox with a 2:53 pm start time and was watched by an average of 612,000 viewers. The show had a 0.17 P18-49 rating, or about 220,000 viewers in the age group.
By a wide margin, this is the lowest viewership for a Tribute to the Troops episode since the concept debuted in 2003. The viewership for Saturday’s airing was about one-third of the audience the annual special had last year when it aired on Fox with a Sunday 5 pm start time. Last year’s show likely benefited from a lead-in following the NFL window on Fox.
The Tribute to the Troops theme, which has always been a Christmas-time tradition for WWE, was originally applied as a special edition of Smackdown (in 2003 and 2004), then of Raw (2005 through 2007), taped at overseas U.S. military bases, before getting a separate time slot of its own, airing on NBC and USA Network until moving to Fox beginning in 2020.
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Though Tribute to the Troops isn’t listed in Showbuzz Daily’s broadcast reporting for Saturday, we’re told the program aired in all markets and was preempted in a small number where it aired at a different time or on another network, but that viewership is also counted toward the final measurement reported here.
There was a 2019 edition of the event but it didn’t air on television.
Viewership history for Tribute to the Troops is shown below.
Subscribers have exclusive access to the Wrestlenomics Viewership Spreadsheet.
Brandon Thurston
brandon@wrestlenomics.com
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