(Sources: Jack A. Encarnacao Jr. of The Boston Globe)
Recent shakeups in the television industry have put professional wrestling on the precipice of significant changes.
After five years on Spike TV, World Wrestling Entertainment will move its highly rated ”Monday Night Raw” broadcast to the USA Network in October. Also, the UPN network will move WWE’s ”Smackdown” show to Friday nights beginning in September, after it spent nearly six years on Thursday nights.
The WWE’s two-hour weekly wrestling shows routinely draw the highest ratings of any show on Spike TV and UPN, attracting between 3.5 million and 5 million viewers nationwide each week. By picking up ”Raw” on Oct. 3, USA will likely become the most-watched station on cable every Monday. ”Raw” routinely places among the five highest-rated shows on all of cable in a given week, and sometimes is the most watched.
WWE relies on TV largely to market the conflicts and characters that attract buys for its bimonthly $34.95 pay-per-view events.
UPN is moving ”Smackdown” to Fridays to make way for ”Everybody Hates Chris,” a new sitcom produced by Chris Rock about the comedian’s childhood. UPN is hoping the series will catch on Thursdays in prime time, traditionally a strong slot for network sitcoms.
The UPN deal is bad news for Boston-area WWE fans. Because the local UPN affiliate broadcasts Red Sox baseball Friday nights, ”Smackdown” will be preempted regularly during the season.
WWE’s move to USA is a homecoming of sorts. ”Raw” was an institution on USA for seven years prior to switching to TNN in 2000. TNN renamed itself Spike TV and built its ”First Network for Men” rebranding campaign around WWE’s programming, which draws a decidedly male audience.
Similarly, USA will put WWE at the center of its upcoming campaign to revamp the station with new graphics and new advertising techniques focusing on the characters of the station’s programs. The plan is to debut the new look of USA on July 8, said Bonnie Hammer, president of the network.
”The whole brand lives in characters,” Hammer said of USA. ”What is WWE? WWE is about action heroes. You have all these supersized men and women with great story lines. The strength of the franchise is in the strength of the characters.”
Another part of the USA deal is the return of ”Saturday Night’s Main Event” on NBC (USA is owned by NBC Universal). The WWE is on NBC for two Saturday night specials this year in place of ”Saturday Night Live” reruns. Throughout the ’80s, WWE performers, led by the charismatic Hulk Hogan, enjoyed their largest American exposure on the weekend TV show.
Spike TV announced in March that it will not renew the WWE’s television contract, partly because WWE was asking too much to renew. WWE spokesman Gary Davis said USA put forward the best offer. ”We felt we had a responsibility to our shareholders to offer the program to other cable networks to see if there was interest,” Davis said. ”To not only be on USA, but then to have late-night specials on NBC, those are things Spike couldn’t offer.”
UPN’s decision to bump ”Smackdown” from Thursdays to Fridays came as a surprise to WWE officials, who found out about the move shortly before the public announcement was made. Davis said the wrestling company is now assessing what it will be like to air on Fridays, a night on which it is theoretically harder to draw the young viewers that make up the core of its audience.
”We know this is a challenge because there’re more entertainment options on Fridays,” Davis said. ”Now we’re trying to figure out some of the strategies to use.”
Televised wrestling enjoyed its highest ratings during the ”Monday Night Wars” of the late ’90s. The audience ballooned to its highest point ever due to the competition between WWE and World Championship Wrestling, a company formerly owned by Ted Turner that broadcast wrestling every Monday night on TNT. At some points, the competition for viewers attracted 10 million people to Monday night wrestling.
The wars ended when WWE purchased WCW in early 2001.
A new installment of the Monday night wrestling wars was expected as recently as last week. A company called Total Nonstop Action Wrestling, funded by Dallas electricity giant Panda Energy, was close to a deal with the WGN Network of Chicago, which broadcasts nationwide as Superstation WGN, to air Monday nights head to head with WWE. The deal fell through late last week, however.
Davis said the WWE welcomes any Monday night competition. ”Bring it on,” he said. ”We’ve been there before. If that helps stoke interest in professional wrestling, great.”
Thanks again for reading,
Joe
