Roman Reigns and Braun Strowman faced off on ‘Monday Night Raw’ this week. (WWE.com)
Two weeks ahead of WrestleMania, this week’s episode of Monday Night Raw drew one of the show’s smallest audiences ever.
According to the Wrestling Observer, March 20th’s Raw drew an audience of 3.04 million viewers. Dave Meltzer notes that this is a record low for a show that was not up against a major sports event and did not air on a holiday.
In particular, there was a large drop off in viewership during Raw‘s third hour; the show drew 3.16 million viewers at 8:00 p.m., but by 10:00 p.m., that number dipped down to 2.87 million viewers.
March 20th’s Raw was the second-to-last show prior to WrestleMania, the company’s biggest event of the year which all of its storylines build to. During the third hour of Raw this week, Roman Reigns faced off against Braun Strowman in the main event. There was a brief appearance by The Undertaker, but this was a surprise and was not advertised heading into the show.
Some fans this year have felt that the build to WrestleMania 33 has been lackluster and that many of the storylines do not have quite the level of excitement they should. The biggest WrestleMania match on the Raw brand is between Brock Lesnar and Bill Goldberg, but neither of those men appeared on Raw this week.
There is also the match between Roman Reigns and The Undertaker, which was added to the WrestleMania 33 card recently.
WrestleMania 33 will air on Sunday, April 2nd on the WWE Network.