WWE Rumour: Monday Night Raw to Return to its Original Format
May 28, 2018 at 2:53 PM
Monday Night Raw is the flagship program of WWE since its innovation in 1993.
The original format of the show was to host it as a two-hour long program. The contents used to be more compact back then. WWE extended it to be a three-hour show starting from 2012. We received a Supershow comprising both Raw and Smackdown superstars.
This decision harmed Smackdown’s significance to a significant extent. The importance of the blue brand faded away. We only had one prime championship in the WWE from then onwards. It marked the extinction of the prestigious world championship back in December 2013. Most of the WWE fans did not like this decision as well as the format of WWE Raw being a three-hour long show.
Sometimes, we do feel Monday Night Raw gets dragged to a certain extent causing it to lose a lot of viewership. Over the past several months there has been a lot of droppings in the TV rating for the flagship program of the WWE.
Despite this, the broadcast partner, USA Network allowed the company to keep this format considering this is the longest running weekly episodic television show in the history.
If the recent reports are any indications, then we might see Monday Night Raw going back to its original format in the upcoming days. The current deal between WWE and the USA Network will run down by the end of 2019, as per hints from SportsKeeda.com. Fox Sports is looking forward to making a new deal with the world’s biggest pro-wrestling company to broadcast the show.
If the deal gets official, the host will trim the show down to two hours considering Fox does come up with a daily news update on 10 PM which is just two hours later from Raw’s beginning at 8 PM in the USA zone. Check out the updates provided by the source,
“Because of the 10 pm news cycle on FOX, it would mean that Raw would have to return to its original two hours runtime, something that the company has been looking at moving back to for a while. It would also allow the company to get more eyes on their product since FOX is seen as a much more traditional network than the USA.”
There are some serious talks about a broadcast change for WWE programming in recent times to increase the TV ratings. If the head honchos think this would do them a favour, then we will see them moving forward from the long-time partner, USA Network.