WWE NXT has had a lot of ups and downs over the years. It went from a bizarre and often bad game show, to a more traditional WWE developmental playground, to its current incarnation that sort of promotes itself as developmental, while secretly being the best WWE programming on a week-to-week basis that features many superstars that are significantly better than how you would define developmental talent.
At its current state, NXT airs on Wednesday at 8/7 C on the WWE Network. It’s not live, meaning fans can and will read weeks of spoilers before tuning in on Wednesday night.
On Friday afternoon, internet investigators discovered that on Wednesday, December 13th, USA Network’s guide is showing an airing of WWE NXT scheduled for 8 p.m. ET, or in other words, NXT’s usual WWE Network airtime. Could it be a guide programming mistake? Sure. Could it be a lot more than that? Maybe?
We did a little digging of our own, and can confirm that some cable guides are showing that WWE NXT is going on air on USA Network on December 13th, and it’s an interesting development, to say the least.
There is a lot of speculation going around right now regarding what WWE and USA Network are doing here. This is airing on USA Network’s themed “WWE Week,” which includes an airing of WWE’s annual ‘Tribute To The Troops” event that Thursday. For those keeping track at home, that gives USA Network four straight days of WWE programming. WWE Raw will air on the 11th, SmackDown on the 12th, NXT on the 13th, and Tribute To The Troops on the 14th.
The special nature of this particular week makes you think this is probably a one-off NXT airing that could double as a testing ground to see if that product can pull in significant viewership on cable TV. So, if you’re an NXT fan who wants to see the show get its own TV deal, you might want to tune in on December 13th.
At best, WWE and USA Network agreed to some sort of deal that will allow NXT to air on USA Network moving forward. That seems somewhat unlikely at this point, as some kind of a larger deal like that would typically leak or be the subject of a bigger announcement before guides started spoiling it, but who knows? Until we get more information from WWE, USA Network, or someone in the know, we’ll continue to speculate.
