WWE: 3 Ways to Make the Product Better
SummerSlam, WWE.com
With SummerSlam just hours away, WWE is at their best. Their storylines are top-notch, and fans are invested in seeing where the company is going to go. But even at your best, there are still changes you need to make to get better.
WWE is currently at the top of their game. Every match on this Sunday’s SummerSlam card feels important. From top to bottom this could easily be the best event WWE has in a long time.
Fans are genuinely intrigued by every match on the card. Either to see how epic it will be, as is the case with the Fatal Four Way main event. Or, how bad it will be, as is the case with the Big Show vs. Big Cass match.
Still though, even with the company at its best, at least in the last decade, there are a few things that bother fans, and these things need to change if WWE wants to keep getting better.
But after SummerSlam, there are a few things WWE could do to keep their upward momentum going.
3. Raw Needs to Go Back Down to Two Hours
As it stands right now if a fan were to watch everything WWE has to offer this week, they would watch a total of nineteen hours of wrestling. Three hours on Monday, three hours on Tuesday (with Smackdown, and 205 Live), an hour of NXT on Wednesday, then four hours of NXT Takeover counting the pre-show, then top that all off with eight hours on Sunday with SummerSlam and it’s own pre-show.
Even on a regular week, it’s seven hours worth of programming. Taking one hour out of it won’t help much, but that’s not the main reason to take Raw back down to two hours.
Watching anything for three hours is a task. There’s a reason most movies are under two hours. Keeping someone’s attention for longer than that is hard. Yet, WWE continues to try and do this every week, even though ratings in Raw’s third hour drop almost every week.
Even the NFL is looking into ways to shorten their game time. Because they’ve noticed that their product is too long to try and watch every week, and they are losing viewers because of it. I am guilty of turning a blowout game off in the fourth quarter because a fifteen-minute quarter somehow turns into a thirty-minute ordeal.
WWE’s reasoning behind moving Raw to three hours was because they were joining the brands, and putting the best guys on one show. It made sense at the time, even then though it was tough to sit through all of it.
Since the brand split though it doesn’t make any sense, the show should go back to two hours. Everything else went back to the way it was before the brand split, shouldn’t Raw?