By Wade Keller, PWTorch editor

Last night's TNA Impact drew a 1.29 overall rating, down from last week's 1.33 rating, but still basically tied for its highest viewership ever. That's the good news - and it is the most important news.

The bad however is hidden in the quarter hours. Once again, the booking let down the talent, as the show opened with a 1.29 rating. That means that the booking failed to build to a main event that attracted more people than who tuned in at the start of the show. That means the booking caused more people to tune out than tuned in over the course of two hours.

Keller's Analysis: The final quarter hour rating was 1.23, the second lowest of the entire show. Only Q7 was lower, barely, at 1.22. The big drop came right after the TNA Knockouts match, either because the fans of the women's division saw what they came for and then left, or because the match was so bad people couldn't stand it anymore, or a combination of both.

The biggest drop otherwise came from Q2 (1.27) to Q3 (1.22). In fairness, the quarter hour usually drops for quarter hours with two commercial breaks instead of one, and that was the case in this instance. It was also a quarter hour that contained no wrestling, and despite that pattern over time, TNA continues to pull back on the quantity of wrestling and add to the angles and backstage segments. Q3 is the segment that included Samoa Joe holding a knife to Scott Steiner's throat, which is up there with Super Shane-O-Mac beating up three top heels on Raw earlier this month as the most inexplicable WTF segment of the year so far.

Don West's rant didn't fare well, either, as the first quarter of the second hour dropped from a 1.34 to a 1.29. That segment, though, also contained two commercial breaks.

The peak rating came in Q4 for the start of the Main Event Mafia segment where Kevin Nash held court. It dropped from 1.34 that segment to a 1.29 at the start of the second hour as Jeff Jarrett and Booker T argued later in that same segment.

The takeaway lesson for TNA is that they should have done a much better job promoting the four-way ladder X Title match. That match was mentioned briefly at the start of the show and not again until it began. If they had applied the same good-faith, genuine hype for that match as the Kurt Angle vs. Sting empty arena match last week, it could have held the audience much better. It isn't great that the fans who tuned out after the Knockouts match didn't tune back in to see the outcome of the Angle-Sting contract signing at the end of the show.

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