We only play wrestlers on TV…
Tuesday, June 10th, 2008Maybe I’m just in an old-school mode tonight, but last Monday’s RAW was a perfect example of what’s wrong with WWE programming at the moment. Typically, RAW is a two-hour-plus-overrun broadcast, right? Right.
So, in the entire first hour of the program, we were treated to only 17 minutes of actual wrestling in the squared circle. Now, of that, 11 minutes went to a somewhat solid JBL vs. John Cena match. Yet the remaining six minuts was taken up not by one, but two other matches that involved superstars crushing superstars.
In a broadcast hour, minus commercials, WWE has approximately 42 minutes to work with. That means while 17 minutes were in the ring, 25 minutes were spent doing in-ring promos and interviews, wrestler entrance music, backstage interviews and skits, and hyping product for WWE and its advertisers.
Folks typically enjoy wrestling because of the wrestling.
It gets worse; the second hour and overrun ran about 1 hour and seven minutes in broadcast time; of that, only 15 minutes were spent in-ring with wrestlers battling each other, and eight of those minutes were spent on a highly abbreviated main event.
So in the second hour, we had probably more like 49 broadcast minutes with the overrun, and only 15 minutes were spend in the ring. The other 34 minutes was all the same non-wrestling stuff the first hour featured, plus Vince McMahon doing the Million Dollar Mania thing.
So let’s do a final analysis, shall we? In about 90 broadcast minutes, we only got six matches total, ranging in length from two mintes to 11 minutes, totaling 32 minutes of wrestling altogether. The remaining 58 minutes was all promos and extraneous content. We’re getting twice as much “other stuff” as we’re getting in terms of real wrestling.
Something has to change about that, and fast, before so much of the audience goes away, we have to nail closed the exterior shutters and call it a day. On the bright side, if you still have friends who say they don’t like wrestling, now you can honestly tell them, “Don’t worry. Raw doesn’t feature much of that stuff anymore, anyway.”
