People think I’m joking at work when I reveal that, as a wrestling fan, attempting to follow two promotions with multiple weekly TV shows, this passion is an eight-hour minimum commitment in my life each week. On weeks where there are PPVs, add another three or four hours to the tally. Twelve hours of wrestling to watch each and every week. 

“Where do you find the time?” my colleagues ask. And they think I’m batshit crazy when I explain that I wake up most weekday mornings at 5am and watch an hour or so of wrestling while working out. But it’s true. WWE Raw on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, AEW Dynamite on Thursdays and Fridays, then the weekend is Smackdown and Collision, usually finishing Collision on Monday morning. If there’s a PPV (which there is at least once a month), that’s usually a Monday evening thing.  PPVs deserve the full respect of a viewing in one sitting.

And even all this watching doesn’t really give the full picture of what is out there to be enjoyed.  I’m not finding the time to watch NXT.  When AEW add an extra hour for a Battle of the Belts, or WWE decide to ride the nostalgia train with another Saturday Night’s Main Event, I just don’t have the hours to engage.  Let alone other promotions like TNA, NJPW, CMLL, or ROH.  The line has to be drawn somewhere because there simply aren’t enough hours in the day if you also want to live some semblance of a life in between all the weekly graps.  

I’m old enough to remember a time when Raw was only one hour long, there was no Smackdown, and there were only four WWE pay-per-views a year.  Watching the indies or international promotions was impossible in this pre-internet age outside of illegal tape traders, and you would never buy that many of these VHS tapes that you would lose days of your life to them.  WCW was the rival promotion and it is there that the hour-grab began.  Their two hour weekly show, Nitro, made WWE decide to compete for our attention.  Then WCW started to add the occasional third hour and WWE followed suit.  Soon the amount of time previously reserved for a PPV was given to weekly TV programming.  Then came Smackdown, and WCW Thunder…

When NXT started showing its weekly show on the WWE Network back in 2014 one of the things that made it so refreshing in comparison to WWE’s stale product was that it was only an hour long.  When AEW began its weekly Dynamite show, the two hours felt necessary as it was the only show they had.  But it eventually caused NXT to bloat into a two hour show to compete.  Fans had to make a choice.  NXT fell off my radar.  Then AEW added an additional show called Rampage, “the fastest hour in wrestling”, until its demise in 2024.  By 2024 I had stopped watching Rampage too, because the new two hour show, Collision, made watching all three additional hours beyond Dynamite untenable.

Recently, I took a trip to America.  Not to watch WrestleMania in Las Vegas, but to see family in New York.  For entertainment on the plane over I downloaded the first WrestleMania I ever saw from Netflix, WrestleMania 8.  It came in at just under three hours.  The 2025 addition, WrestleMania 41, took place over two nights and the shortest one of the two shows was three hours and twenty minutes.  The first night was nearly four hours.  However, each night was preceded by a three hour “Countdown” show on YouTube beforehand, making each day a six hour plus event if you wanted to indulge in all the festivities.  Not to mention the NXT Takeover show the morning of WrestleMania Saturday, the Hall of Fame ceremony that came after Friday Night Smackdown…  

Although I wasn’t in the States to attend ‘Mania live, WrestleMania Sunday our trip was dominated by wrestling.  We watched Night One in the morning, took a break for lunch and to get some air, then were back in time for Night Two.  A nearly seven hour wrestling day, holed up in a hotel room in Manhattan.  The event was a lot of fun, but the time-suck of the thing felt wholly ridiculous.  Meanwhile every AEW PPV is four hours long plus a “Zero-Hour” pre-show of an additional sixty minutes beforehand.

On the one hand, the sheer hour-age of modern wrestling could be seen as wonderful for those who wish to do nothing else with their lives but watch professional wrestling.  But for those of us who adore wrestling, but also have other hobbies, passions, jobs, families, etc. we want to give time to in our lives, there is a growing sense that wrestling programming is becoming unmanageable.  And worse, that the endless hours of content (I didn’t even mention all the YouTube shows and podcasts), start to make each flagship show (Raw, Dynamite) increasingly inessential viewing.

To be clear – “inessential” does not mean “not good”.  Both shows are a blast.  But, with so much happening elsewhere, there is very little payoff to the view who chooses to be loyal to a particular programme.  A regular Dynamite viewer is given the blow-off match from a feud located previously entirely on Collision.  A Raw audience is given the “surprise” of a familiar face for viewers of NXT but someone who means nothing to you if you don’t watch the show.  WWE’s porous brand split, especially around WrestleMania season, means that the sanctity of two distinct shows is regularly undone by crossover appearances…and then there always seems to be another draft just around the corner.  

Imagine watching EastEnders loyally for ten years only for them to suddenly, mid-storyline, “shake things up” and get rid of loads of your favourite characters and replace them with people from Coronation Street! When wrestling shows become interchangeable from each other, with no distinct personality, everything blends into one big nothingness.  Perfect for the casual viewer who just wants to drop in every now and again, watch a few matches, and move on, but a kick in the teeth to a long-term fan trying to invest sufficient time in the product that the storylines and matches have their emotional pay-off.  

I blamed WCW earlier, but in a way this isn’t wrestling’s fault, it is the fault of sports in general under capitalism.  I’m a baseball fan too, and if I wanted to I could watch my team, the Red Sox, play 162 games each year, each game lasting an average of around three hours.  And as every team in every division plays the same number of games, not including the post-season that’s over two thousand games you could watch during the regular baseball season.  

I watch football too (UK, not American).  Though the matches are shorter, at a minimum of ninety minutes, there are 38 matches to watch between August to May for each team in the Premier League, and 22 games to watch per team in the Women’s Super League.  That’s without including international competitions which can take up months of your life, and all the national matches and additional things like the Champion’s League.  I don’t watch cricket, but these matches also take between three to four hours at their shortest and, at their longest, last over five days!  But I do sometimes partake in watching tennis, where a grand slam match could take three hours or more too.

Sports under capitalism fight for market-share in an attention economy.  So too, does sports-entertainment.  It is part of the business model to leave you little time for anything else because, if you had time for something else, the money you spend over there is money the product you aren’t now watching is losing out on.  And no business can stand leaving money on the table.  This is why not only is do sports under capitalism push the limits of your time-tolerance to ensure you are a captive audience for their products for as long as is sustainable, but they also sell absolutely everything that happens, every year, as somehow the most unbelievable and most important ad exciting thing in the sport’s history.  These stories of breakthrough superstars or underdog miracles make us wish we had been paying attention, and nurturing that feeling is precisely their function in the business model.  They are not reporting facts, they are marketing a product to us.

I’m not trying to suck all the fun out wrestling by pointing that out.  What I’m trying to do is recognise that the “fear of missing out” which sometimes makes me feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day to watch all the wrestling I want to is an intentionally manipulative device used by these companies to line their pockets, or compete with the market-leaders and increase their market-share.  To point out that, as a business model, the wrestlers really are interchangeable: just different variations of the same compelling theatre used to sell advertising space or tickets to the shows.  There’s no shame in not watching all of it.  Nor is there any gain to be had if there are other things you’d rather be doing.  

Watch as much, or as little, as you want, and have no regrets about all the stuff that you don’t get to.  The truly great stuff never gets lost.  You hear about it forever.  Randy Savage vs Ricky the Dragon.  Lynch vs Charlotte.  HBK vs Undertaker.  Bret Hart vs Steve Austin.  Punk vs Cena.  Flair vs Steamboat.  Mankind vs Undertaker Hell in a Cell.  The Great Sasuke vs Jushin Liger.  Rey vs Eddie. Paige vs Emma.  Joe vs Punk.  Raven vs Dreamer.  Okada vs Tanahashi.  Cody vs Dustin.  Dragunov vs Walter.  FTR vs the Briscoes.  Taz vs Sabu. Toni Storm vs Mariah May.  Ospreay vs Omega (and pretty much anything either of those guys ever do). Iyo Sky vs Rhea Ripley vs Bianca Belair.  To name but a few.  There is always amazing art coming out of commerce and the important thing is to focus on the art, not get too bogged down in the meaningless stuff of business.

This same lesson can be applied to all the amazing TV you always hear about but never have time to watch.  I remember finally getting my hands on the MAS*H boxset in about 2009, over twenty years since it went off the air.  It was still brilliant, and I realised as I watched it that good stuff always would be.  It would stand the test of time.  If a show isn’t going to be worth watching twenty years from now, then it probably isn’t really worth watching now either.  Wrestling is no different.  The true magic is rare stuff, and a lot of those endless weekly hours are just filler between commercials.  Get what you need from it.  Find the good stuff.  But don’t give it your whole life.  Just as much of that life as you think is worth the trade-off.  For me, it’s eight to twelve hours a week.      

Until next time…

DaN McKee

www.everythingdanmckee.com

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