WWE isn’t returning back to TV-14 anytime soon.
Despite rumors that WWE will change up their programming to the TV-14 format, it appears as if plans have indeed changed. According to Wrestling Observer’s Dave Meltzer, the company decided against the change, citing a potential clash with their advertisers as the main reasoning.
“That’s not gonna happen now,” Meltzer mentioned. “Yeah, that was one of the new things. Andrew (Zarian) knows the whole story. Absolutely, there were memos and everything. It was planned. And I think that’s the new regime and that could be Stephanie instead of Vince. Vince maybe was considering it. Stephanie’s thing is let’s not make Mattel unhappy and we don’t need it (the TV-14 rating). You know what I mean? And they don’t.”
Meltzer noted that since Vince McMahon’s departure that ratings have been as high as they’ve been in a number of years and while their programming isn’t similar to AEW in the nature of swearing and wrestlers bleeding on a near-weekly basis, WWE doesn’t need to fix what isn’t broken:
“Well now, AEW is not going up (in the ratings, compared to Raw/SmackDown) and we are going up. So why do we need to fight them to do what they did that stopped working? If you look at the trajectory of everything, it’s kind of like, yeah that’s probably a decision that we shouldn’t make right now. So they didn’t, so I actually congratulate them for reversing course, based on analyzing what’s happened in the last four months.”
Inside The Ropes will provide any updates on the status of WWE’s programming.
(h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcriptions)