On a recent edition of his “The Extreme Life of Matt Hardy” podcast, Matt Hardy discussed the challenges of working the third hour of WWE Monday Night RAW.
On the September 9th episode of Monday Night RAW, WWE announced that the flagship show would return to a two-hour format from October 7th until the end of the year.
As we’ve been reporting here on eWn, RAW will likely return to its three-hour format on Netflix in January 2025, and the show’s runtime will be flexible.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On how WWE stars feel about RAW being three hours: “I think the general consensus was that three hours was just too much time. It was too long of a show to keep people interested. It was just hard to fill up three hours of TV time with really entertaining content on stuff. But I think financially, it ended up being worth it. And I think they definitely improved upon the formula as time went on, over time. I think a two-hour show is a really good amount of time to like put in a show. And it’s like one of those shows where — this is kind of like a mindset in pro wrestling, I think. You kind of want to give the people a show, especially if you’re doing like a live event or house or whatever. You know, if you go out there and you can give them two solid hours where it’s able to satiate them and they enjoy it, but like you don’t overdo it. And at the end of the night, you leave them wanting more. And I feel like TV kind of translates to that as well. It’s good to do. Sometimes just that three-hour block, especially when they didn’t have a ton of amazing talents or amazing stories, or whatever going on, it was sometimes very hard to fill.”
On working the third hour: “There are plenty of times when you end up on shows when you’re later in the night. I mean, anytime we do TNA — if we’re doing a TNA TV taping, now it’s probably going to be four hours long. You know, three and a half, four hours long. Jeff and I are going on last and we’re pretty much guaranteed about it. But that’s like — you know, it’s our job. We’re supposed to be able to get the crowd up a little bit and be excited about whatever we’re doing. And it was tough as a talent, especially if you’re in one of those really hard crowds. Like somewhere in the Northeast, where the people kind of want to sit on their hands, or whatever it may be, it would be challenging to go out there at three hours. Don’t get me wrong, if you’re not the main event, the match I would prefer to be in in the first match on the show where the crowd is hot, and they’re good, and they’re lively. So yeah, those three-hour television shows are very long, but I think financially it was worth it the long haul.”
