Despite the fact that this week's SmackDown Live didn't actually air live, ratings were up with a solid 2.603 million viewers in total. WWE even shared spoilers online hours before the show aired but that seemingly only increased excitement due to the fact that AJ Styles defeated Jinder Mahal to become WWE Champion for the second time ahead of this year's Survivor Series PPV.
This marked a 23% increase from last week's disappointing 2.12 million viewers (which was SmackDown Live's second-lowest rating of the year). It's likely that Styles' win was a response to that number but you have to believe that Vince McMahon will have realised that no one actually wanted to see Jinder Mahal battle Brock Lesnar! Simply put, the Mahal experiment has been a failure.
Regardless, next week's SmackDown Live is looking like a stacked show ahead of Survivor Series, especially as there's a very good chance we'll see the RAW roster invade the show in some way.