Serious question? How long should a TV broadcast wrestling show be? How many shows should there be a week? How many hours have you got spare to watch wrestling?

I’ve found myself asking this question more and more over the years. The first time was way back in 1998 during the Monday Night Wars. Was Nitro being extended to 3 hours actually a good thing? The first few months of the 3-hour shows were excellent. The programmes didn’t feel bloated, matches ran a bit longer, there were more matches, interviews, promos, and backstage segments ran a little longer too. 

The main problem was that, after a few months, this feeling of the extra hour turned from a bonus to a hindrance. Not every wrestler is meant to have 20-minute matches on TV every week. Did anyone want to watch Vincent/Virgil have long matches…actually, did anyone want to watch him wrestle at all? There were dozens of performers given longer time on the mic, some of whom shouldn’t have even been given a mic in the first place. I don’t know who thought Dean Malenko should have been given mic time, but that was a poor choice. Yes, one of the greatest in-ring guys of his generation, but he had the vocal skills and personality of a block of ice.

As the weeks rolled on, the quality waned and rather than feeling like you were getting real, tangible added value, it felt more and more like you were slogging your way through filler designed to fill airtime to make WCW money in advertising dollars. The only saving grace at this time was Thunder. As much as there was frequently some great wrestling on the show, its 2-hour runtime was actually more like an hour of undercard matches (cruiserweight tag team division, anyone?) and an hour of recap. This meant with some heavy-handed fast forwarding, you could get 5 hours of screen time down to more like 3.

There was also Raw and SmackDown to watch! With some heavy fast forwarding, you could get through these in roughly 2 hours as well. Here we were at one of wrestling’s creative peaks, spoiled for content and rushing through it because there was a lot of filler.

This was the first time I found myself seriously asking the question, is more actually better?

Fast forward to 2012…Someone in WWE, most likely Vince, seeing dollar signs from the TV network and, rather importantly, NOT learning from WCW, expanded Raw to 3 hours. Repeat much the same saga as WCW, but here we are over a decade later, and Raw is still 3 hours and so stuffed with filler, I honestly struggle to watch a whole episode. Worse stil,l in the new Netflix era, rather than advert breaks giving you a nice clean line to hit the fast forward button, the breaks are now absorbed into the show with internal ads and sponsor pushes.

I don’t want to get onto PPV/PLE’s getting longer as well. That is a topic for another day.

Let’s not forget AEW in this debate…

AEW launched with Dynamite, a 2-hour show which had special episodes, Beach Break, New Year’s Smash, Blood and Guts, Fight for the Fallen…to break up their more limited PPV schedule. When the show launched, their roster was quite deep, and it meant that you wouldn’t necessarily see all the stars on the show each week, which was actually a good thing because it made it worthwhile tuning in week in, week out. Each week was different; you saw some familiar faces regularly, but not the same faces week in, week out.

Next they launched Dark as an online show, which was their undercard show. Very much the sort of show you could skip if you wanted and not miss anything major for the main TV plot lines. Fast forward to 2021, they launched Dark: Elevation, again online, with more undercard matches, which you could skip if you wanted. However, they also launch Rampage. Only an hour, usually 3 matches and some catch up, most of the time it would have one match you might need to watch, but it mostly felt like quality filler to give some of the growing roster TV time. At this point, the necessary watch time was still around 2 hours. I would always watch Dynamite and if I had an odd hour spare, I’d watch Rampage because it was still a decent watch.

Jump ahead to 2023, and for a very long and complicated list of reasons that aren’t best discussed here…AEW added the 2-hour Collision to their weekly programming (and cancelled the Dark and Dark: Elevation shows). The problem was, much like the errors of WCW, there wasn’t a clear need or deep enough roster to expand the programming to this extra show. Even as a fairly die-hard fan, this was the point where I found myself tuning out of AEW on a weekly basis. The addition of Collision, combined with the cancelling of Dark & Dark:Elevation, resulted in all of the undercard matches moving to the main show and as a result, rather than having one JAM PACKED 2 hour broadcast (and some optionally skippable TV) that you felt you couldn’t miss, you were faced with 4 hours of TV with the quality you expected of AEW mixed with some serious filler. I know I’m not alone thinking this.

Where does this leave me as a wrestling fan?

WWE, I keep up to date with the news, watch anything that my friends who are watching weekly say is worth checking out, WWE are great at putting this on their youtube channel. Then watching the monthly PLE’s (still not used to saying that) at a get together with friends (thanks Dave & Kirsty!).

AEW has become a similar story. I’ve been to 4 PPVs (2 international and both UK shows) and 3 TV tapings (2 international and the Cardiff show), which is one hell of an achievement for someone who lives in the UK…but at the moment, I still struggle to find the time to watch week to week.

The strange thing is, I’m primarily talking about the big 2, but we all know TNA is doing good work right now, NJPW is building again, ROH is still putting on great shows, Progress, DDT, GCW, RevPro…your local indie(s) deserves your attention as much as mine!

If you asked me to sit in my house and watch 3 hours of Raw or get out of the house, go to an ATTACK PRO! show and spend some time with my friends…I know which one I’m picking.

As per usual, I’ve flown off handle and lost the plot a little…let’s get back to the point…

Would you rather have 5 hours of programming that you are hardly watching because it isn’t engaging enough to get you to stop looking at your phone? Let’s be honest we are all guilty of this. 5 hours of background noise whilst you do the housework/catch up on emails/eat dinner/half pay attention to your family?

I totally understand that TV time equals money for wrestling companies. Netflix paid $5 billion dollars for 10 years of WWE! Even doing ballpark maths, that is roughly 3000 hours of programming at an hourly rate of $1.6 million dollars an hour! 

I’m also fully aware that from a logistical perspective, it’s going to be easier to record more programming in one location than move everything around for an hour’s filming! Batch filming in the 21st century is a nightmare. Back during the Monday Night War, you really had to work hard to find the spoilers from pre-taped episodes; now, thanks to algorithms and social media accounts, it is hard enough to make it to the morning after an event without spoilers.

But…here’s the bottom line (‘cause Michael said so…that feels too strong). Are we better off? 

I have felt most invested in a wrestling company when its weekly shows are 2 hours and regular PPVs. I’m completely gripped and don’t want to miss a moment, and equally, if I miss a week, it’s an easy catch-up. If there was one unmissable 2-hour show from WWE and similar from AEW, I’d make the time to watch both, and I’d be a much happier fan for it. Certainly happier than a fan struggling to find 10+ hours a week to watch and consequently, and rather disappointingly…watching none.

Somewhere out there, there is a highlight show that is the best bits from the big weekly shows, boiled down to the decent matches and the important promos. I know I would be missing some of the idiosyncrasies, but even cutting out adverts, events, and product promo, some of the entrances, and the occasional squash match would make life much easier.

Do you know where I can find that? If so, please tell me. Michael Partridge 

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