There were discussions over the past few weeks that WWE’s Monday Night RAW will be changed to a TV-14 show again, which will resemble the Attitude Era and a memo was even sent out in the USA Network this past July informing everyone of the changes, but things happened and the show still remains TV-PG. On a recent edition of the Wrestling Observer Radio Program, Dave Meltzer revealed the reasons why WWE’s plans changed and one of the main reasons is they do not want to make Mattel unhappy.
Dave Meltzer also revealed that the other reasoning for the WWE is that they feel AEW is not going up in the ratings compared to WWE RAW and WWE SmackDown, while they are and why should they do something which doesn’t seem to be getting the job done anymore as Warner has told AEW to tone down their language.
This is what Dave Meltzer said:
“That’s not gonna happen now.” “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.”
“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.”
Since Triple H has been in charge of creative, several changes has been noticeable such as former and released WWE Stars being brought back, an improvement in the booking of the matches and the personas, excitement levels increasing for both the WWE Universe and the Superstars themselves and a lot of the silly skits being removed, but it looks like the WWE will not be changing to TV-14, at least for now.
H/T to WrestlingNews.co for transcribing the quotes.
