We’ve known since last week that Smackdown is getting bumped from Fox to FS1 tomorrow night, to make room for a Friday night World Series game on Fox. Then came news that Fox would be airing some kind of hour-long WWE program on Sunday afternoon, but nobody was quite sure what that was. Now things have become more clear, if no less baffling.
Fox and WWE have now announced that what Fox is airing on Sunday is “a special one-hour, abbreviated version of SmackDown.”
Weirdly, WWE edited that bit out of their announcement, although it originally appeared there too. Now they’re just covering the Friday-night move to FS1 and not mentioning the edited Sunday Smackdown, even though Fox is still promoting it.
The one-hour Smackdown officially airs “following the network’s NFL coverage,” which means times will vary by local market. Apparently in some places Smackdown is happening at 2pm, but where I live there’s a Tennessee Titans game on then, so Smackdown isn’t schedule to start until 5pm. It’s also followed by an hour of The Goldbergs reruns, which raises the question of why it needs to be edited down to an hour instead of just airing in full. Maybe in some markets it needs to be wedged into a free hour between two games, or maybe Goldbergs reruns just do better numbers for Fox than Smackdown.
