Following the fourth episode of The Challenge: USA, ratings seem to show that viewers’ interest has remained at a decent level for the CBS spinoff show.
The spinoff has brought cast members from popular series, including Amazing Race, Big Brother, Love Island, and Survivor, into the world of The Challenge, a longtime MTV competition series.
Even though the show lacks cast members from the MTV show that fans have become very familiar with, it seems to bring a fair share of competitive intensity and drama.
With TJ Lavin hosting the show, featured stars include Love Island’s Shannon St. Clair, Amazing Race winner James Wallington, Survivor winner Tyson Apostol, and Big Brother 23 winner Xavier Prather.
In the latest episode, viewers watched as several of Xavier’s former BB castmates sought revenge against him for his “backstabbing” during their season.
Ratings for Episode 4 were recently revealed, and have continued to be much higher than the recent season of MTV’s show, The Challenge: Spies, Lies & Allies.
This report contains spoilers for Episode 4 of the recent episode of The Challenge: USA.
The Challenge: USA, Episode 4 featured revenge story
CBS aired The Challenge: USA, Episode 4 on Wednesday, July 27, and featured Big Brother stars looking to get back at one of their own.
Alyssa Lopez and Kyland Young, who appeared on Big Brother 23, were one of the random teams that the Algorithm created at the start of the episode. Another team featured their former BB castmate and the season winner, Xavier, who got teamed up with Survivor’s Shan Smith.
Alyssa and Kyland won the daily challenge, which featured host TJ’s favorite game, trivia. That kept them safe from elimination and gave them the power to send another team into elimination to face the daily challenge losers, David Alexander and Justine Ndiba.
They took the opportunity to get revenge on Xavier, choosing him and Shan as the elimination opponents for David and Justine. Ultimately, David and Justine won the Smash In Puzzle Out event, sending X and Shan home.
It brought some heated confessional comments, tweets, and exit interview remarks from Shan and Xavier, who had plenty to say about their castmates’ big game moves. Alyssa also tweeted about Shan’s comments, giving fans quite a bit of drama on social media after the episode.
Ratings ticked up for Episode 4 of spinoff
According to Showbuzz Daily’s stats, the latest episode of The Challenge: USA had a 0.42 rating amongst adults in the 18-49 demographic. That was up 0.02 from Episode 3 of the spinoff season.
It also had 2.18 million viewers watching the episode, which followed CBS’ Big Brother, and aired in the 9 p.m. ET slot on Wednesday. For comparison, no episode from MTV’s recent Spies, Lies & Allies season had more than 720,000 viewers, although CBS tends to bring more viewers overall.
CBS’ The Challenge: USA bested all other shows in that 9 p.m. slot on July 27 too. Other major networks showed reruns, including Abbott Elementary on ABC and Chicago Fire on NBC.
Based on the numbers so far, it appears that fans are invested in the CBS Challenge spinoff. However, it’s difficult to tell if the viewership includes longtime MTV viewers switching over to watch the new spinoff or if it’s more fans of the CBS reality shows deciding to watch The Challenge.
Episodes will continue to air each Wednesday on CBS for The Challenge spinoff, with the 38th season of the MTV show expected to bring episodes out before the end of the year.
The Challenge: USA airs Wednesdays at 9/8c on CBS. The Challenge Season 38 is TBA for MTV.
Episodes of The Challenge are now streaming on Paramount+. Try it FREE!
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