Last month, WWE implemented a new policy barring wrestling matches bleeding into commercial breaks. This came after years of TV matches being regularly interrupted by commercials, during which the competitors in the ring would usually begin to stall with restholds. This was never a particularly popular thing to do with fans, but it took the slowly emerging pressure from Fox to shift to a more sports-based product to get them to attempt to change this.
However, they quickly made people miss mid-match commercials due to the way they opted to implement this. They could simply book more short matches or format the show so as to allow uninterrupted longer bouts. But they instead chose to regularly have matches be interrupted and restarted for various reasons. Or book random 2 out of 3 falls matches so that they could take commercial breaks between falls.
This was quickly met with derision by not only fans but by the writing team. WWE’s creative teams quickly began to stress over finding different ways to stop several matches each week. It should be noted though, according to Wrestling Inc, ratings for Raw have increased by 3% (not counting last week’s Raw Reunion which would obviously inflate the number) during this period. This would seem to back the longstanding theory that breaks during matches caused some viewers to lose interest.
Nonetheless, as of last night, it would appear that WWE have greatly laxed their stance on this matter. In fact, they may be outright binning the idea. The Mysterio/Cesaro section of the Gauntlet match, as well as the Ziggler/Rollins match both experienced the traditional commercial break interruptions.
Personally speaking, I will never be a fan of interrupting a match with a commercial.
One of my biggest WWE pet peeves was always how, during Kickoff shows, even those matches would be interrupted for WWE Network advertisements. I mean, come on, seriously? It’s literally the one scenario where there would never be any need to even think about commercial breaks. And yet they choose to cut into already fairly brief matches anyway. It was an amazing revelation to me last year when I found that they had infact stopped cutting away during NXT and 205 Live matches. Because whaddya know, you can totally do that on the WWE Network, turns out! This has allowed full-length and often much better bouts on these shows as a result.
However, if given the choice between having those interrupting commercials or doing things the way has been doing them over the past few weeks, I’d certainly choose the former. I wouldn’t even mind a round system of sorts to allow breaks between rounds. But arbitrarily making a match 2 out of 3 falls for no reason other than wanting to book it longer than some other matches truly defies all logic and is rather kayfabe obliterating if you think about it for three seconds.
Perhaps it helped ratings. But it was a creative nightmare heaped on top of a product already suffering enough as it is. I’d love for them to simply book a show where matches don’t bleed into commercials. It’s much better than contrived stuff like this.
That said, we’ll see how tonight’s SmackDown is done before declaring this thing officially dead.
