If you’ve watched Monday Night Raw lately, chances are you’ve seen more USA Network commercials than action. Any match that goes more than seven minutes gets one (or usually two) commercial breaks, cutting it down to the bare minimum allowable “wrestling” on the three-hour wrestling show. I know more about what the lady from The Radkes thinks about kale, what’s going on in the Chrisley Knows Best cinematic universe, and when I can watch an all-new episode of Suits than I know about the WWE Superstars and why they’re doing anything.
That’s reportedly about to change, but don’t get excited: it’s just semantics.
In the latest edition of Wrestling Observer Radio, where plans can change as quickly as Savannah Chrisley when she arrives on Ro-de-o Drive, it was reported that … hang on …
… it was reported that Vince McMahon held a meeting last week to announce that WWE will no longer be splitting up matches with ad breaks. That initially sounds like great news — they finally figured out that people tuning into the WWE show might want to see more about WWE and less about Papa John — but here’s the rub. The delicious, Cajun rub on our new Louisiana fast chicken.
Wonder why there were suddenly so many 2-out-of-3 falls matches happening on Raw and Smackdown? Because the belief is that if they have a fall, they can go to a commercial and come back to the next fall, and you won’t have missed anything important. So instead of starting a match, going to commercial, and coming back for the ending, you now get a much shorter match, followed by a commercial, followed by the beginning and end of the same match. So it’s exactly the same thing, except now Sami Zayn loses twice instead of once.
Overall, I think that-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6SaHzToFS8
– what I’m saying is that they shouldn’t-
Sigh, nevermind. It’s also noted that a lot of recent Raw changes like the dangerous and funky third hour with the dimmed lights have already been forgotten, so if you tune into Raw on Monday and they crash to break as soon as the bell sounds, you’ll know the plans, they are a-changing.
