By: Mason Mattu, News Writer
“Are. You. Ready?”
These are the words World Wrestling Entertainment’s (WWE) chief content officer Triple H asked a Monday Night Raw audience on the company’s first ever Netflix broadcast. In January of 2024, the two companies announced a deal in which Raw would exclusively air on Netflix around the world. Alongside this, Friday Night SmackDown, NXT, and “premium live events” (pay-per-views) would stream live on Netflix in countries outside of the US.
Triple H has been in charge of WWE’s creative processes since July of 2022 following the infamous retirement of Vince McMahon. Triple H’s booking strategy has always focused on “long-term storytelling” with lots of room for younger WWE talent to develop. However, one of the major criticisms that has been levied against him is that the company’s product has become too predictable.
Following WWE’s recent Royal Rumble event, Triple H stated that “predictable can be good.” This comes as returning WWE superstar and 13-time women’s champion Charlotte Flair recently won the Royal Rumble in a move deemed unpopular by WWE’s fanbase. Talk about predictable.
This is an example of the decline in WWE’s quality in the Netflix era. I remember watching the first WWE Netflix episode of Raw on January 6, 2025 and thinking, “This is going to be great.” About an hour into this ordeal, I realized something was distinctively different from previous WWE shows. Something had totally changed.
Matches on Raw now feel painfully slow-paced and drawn-out.
There used to be something special about sitting down, flipping over to Sportsnet, and watching some entertaining WWE matches. In a world that’s becoming more dominated by streaming giants, I am truly concerned that the quality of professional wrestling is continuing to erode.
As WWE moves to an online streaming platform for almost all of its international weekly content, there have been some very obvious declines in the product. Matches on Raw now feel painfully slow paced and drawn out. Wrestlers take more time than before to walk down to the ring, and deliver awkward promos. Although Raw moved from a three hour time slot to a roughly two hour slot on Netflix, it feels as though WWE writers don’t know what to do with the time they have. If anything, I feel as though it’s more of a burden to watch two hours of Raw on Netflix than the traditional three hour slot. This is mixed in with streaming issues, glitches, constant commercial breaks, and Netflix’s streaming audio being undeniably crappy.
While the shows that are directly aired on Netflix are clearly taking a hit in quality, so are WWE shows that don’t exclusively air on Netflix. Friday Night SmackDown, airing on the USA Network, has faced the trickle down impacts of the new Netflix era in WWE. It seems as though management is trying everything in their power to change the product to reflect the “innovating” time that the company is in. This means that on SmackDown, you are finding the same issues as on Raw. One user on r/greatnessofwrestling put it best: “This shit is like watching a super long ad with a little wrestling thrown in.”
It is hard to deny the fact that the WWE raked in the big bucks with this new Netflix deal — and we are in no doubt in a new era of WWE. However, this new era is proving to be extremely crappy.
