MR. TITO: AEW and TNA Need to Move Their Shows to Monday Night to Compete with WWE RAW

First and foremost, congrats to TNA Wrestling for generating buzz during and after their recent Pay Per View, Hard to Kill. They had the artists formerly known as Dolph Ziggler, Dana Brooke, and Top Dolla (former WWE talents) debuting under different names while featuring 9 matches with a title defended on almost all of them. Overall, the show seemed to be enjoyed by fans… Cool, where can I go to watch their television show?

Currently, TNA’s “Impact” show can be found on AXS on Thursday Nights at 8pm… AXS? You mean the Cable/Satellite channel available to about 50 million homes? Compare that to USA Network, TBS, and TNT at or around 70 million homes. Usually, for television ratings sheets, you don’t make the list unless you have something well above 150,000 viewers… TNA Impact never appears on the list, so is thus assumed to be below that number.

But here’s the real deal, folks… Let’s assume that you are a dedicated wrestling fan and you want to support WWE, AEW, and TNA as wrestling promotions. Well, here is your life:

Monday – 3 hours of WWE RAW
Tuesday – 2 hours of WWE’s NXT
Wednesday – 2 hours of AEW Dynamite
Thursday – 2 hours of TNA Impact
Friday – 2 hours of WWE Smackdown, 1 hour of AEW Rampage
Saturday – 2 hours of AEW Collision, possibly a PPV/PLE
Sunday – Possibly a PPV/PLE

Are we out of our collective minds here? And that’s NOT including if you follow any other independent wrestling promotion or something international. Where do you find the damn time?

Back in my day, the late 1990s when wrestling was GREAT, we conveniently watched the BEST of pro wrestling on 1 singular night. You may have heard of it, also known as the “Monday Night Wars”. It initially featured 2 hours of WCW Nitro going up against a mostly taped 1 hour of RAW. Then, it morphed into 2 hours of live WCW Nitro versus 2 hours of RAW that was live every other week. Then, it became 3 hours of WCW Nitro versus 2 hours of RAW. This was through late 1997 and things were going great.

But then WCW made a FATAL mistake… They created WCW Thunder or as I called it, “WCW Chunder” because it was booked poorly. By the way, WCW also had WCW Saturday Night still running, though it clearly took a backseat to WCW Nitro. WCW had over-exposed itself with too much content during 1998 and not enough quality to keep fans excited about their product.

WWE also expanded its product… Kudos to Virtue for reliving this great show recently on NoDQ Review, but Sunday Night Heat was initially fun as a 1 hour Sunday Night show… Then, WWE Smackdown happened. Suddenly, Heat was irrelevant and then WWE was tasked with pushing quality on both RAW and Smackdown to begin the year 2000. While they kept up good momentum for a while, WWE actually burned out their fans through the year 2000 as numbers will show. By 2001, while WCW and ECW were gone, we still had 2 nights filled with WWE content to follow (couldn’t DVR it or YouTube it back then, VCRs were a pain) and the monthly Pay Per Views really wore you it. Gee, wonder why WWE declined during the 2000s.

It’s the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility… Give someone too much of a good, their added satisfaction declines. Try eating a big bowl of chocolate bars and measure when you start feeling sick. Each subsequent bar tastes worse than the previous one, the point where you have a belly ache. Same thing with consuming as much pizza as you can. Same goes for wrestling… Watch too much of it, you’ll wonder where you life has gone…

But if you watch too much LOW QUALITY wrestling shows, you’ll get burned out on it easily. Sorry, but 3 hours of RAW sucks… It just does. WWE only has a few good bits in the show whereas the rest is just filler or commercials. I don’t know how anyone buys tickets to see RAW live, as it’s totally miserable to watch on television. While Dynamite has good moments here and there, Rampage and Collision are CLEARLY struggling. They don’t have the talent to hold 3 additional hours of shows, nor do they have good creative to make anything compelling or interesting.

So how do you fix this issue of QUANTITY and QUALITY at the same time?

Simple…

(a) AEW moves Collision to Monday Nights
(b) TNA moves their show to Wednesday Nights

Or hell…

(c) Both AEW and TNA move shows to Monday Night to compete with WWE RAW.

Make it CONVENIENT for wrestling fans to view multiple wrestling shows on a single night. Trust me, if I did it during 1997, fans with smart devices and multiple televisions can do it now. Hell, I’m often watching television and something on my iPad daily anyway and I suspect there are many with raging ADD like me.

But let me present you with FACTS…

1) WWE Monday Night RAW declined in viewership once WCW began falling apart during 2000, but really lost viewership during 2001 without WCW on Monday Nights.

2) While TNA gave up on their concept early, their initial head-to-head with RAW on 1/4/2010 drew a 1.5 rating (not viewership number, but TV rating) compared to RAW’s 3.6. Their show actually elevated RAW that night, along with WWE ramping up their show in light of competition. TNA tried a few more shows on Mondays throughout 2010, but ultimately the Bischoff/Hogan reunion scared off fans for TNA in the long-run. Brother.

3) AEW vs. NXT Wednesday Night boosted higher ratings for BOTH collectively, and neither has scored the same viewership since. Competition spurred quality, but it also created a larger audience to flip between shows on Wednesdays.

Go ahead, pull the viewership or ratings from Meltzer’s site or my boy Gerweck.net… When shows went head-to-head, wrestling fans REWARDED both promotions by sticking around. Having 2 shows competed increased the chances of the wrestling fan watching on a given night. At one point, RAW and Nitro were each pulling over 5 million viewers for their shows during 1998.

I know that TNA/Impact tried the Twitch route and NWA tried the YouTube route… Could you imagine either one trying to live stream on Monday Nights against RAW? How convenient would that be? I’m watching RAW on my big screen TV and watching TNA or NWA on YouTube/Twitch. That would work really well and save the wrestling fan TIME.

“Time is a luxury that we do not have.”

Monday Night is a sacred night for Pro Wrestling. Since the early 1990s, it has been home to Monday Night RAW, the mostly flagship show of the WWE. It was also home to the ONLY promotion who ever became more successful than Vince McMahon Jr.’s WWE and that was WCW led by Eric Bischoff. Furthermore, when it’s not NFL football season, it conveniently fills that void on Monday Nights. When football season is on, both are great for channel flipping. Once again, we’re in 2024 and we can watch one on a big screen TV and another on an iPad. Easy to do!

Monday fills other voids as well… For one, it’s the first weekday following a weekend Pay Per View (or Paid Live Event). It’s an instant follow-up to a big PPV/PLE cliffhanger that you MUST see. Secondly, WORK SUCKS… What better way to escape the pain of you returning to work after a weekend than to see guys beating the crap out of each other in a ring? Wrestling was MADE for Monday Nights.

Sorry, but it feels kinda weird on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday Nights… Just too many nights of consecutive wrestling viewership. But most of all, wrestling was NOT and I repeat NOT made for Friday Nights. What kind of IDIOT agrees to air shows on Fridays when the younger half of the 18-49 demographic is attending High School Football/Basketball or attempting to get laid somewhere? WWE Smackdown scored up to 2.5 million viewers on Friday nights on FOX. Imagine if that quality of a show headlined by Roman and the Bloodline was on another weeknight other than Friday? Easily over 3 million viewers.

Wrestling used to be on Saturdays and Sundays, but Monday Night stole their thunder (or “chunder”). Saturday and Sundays should be reserved for special events, such as PPVs or PLEs, when you get gather all of your friends to watch top level events. AEW Collision is a joke and is just wasting our time because Tony has an exhausted roster and he cannot write creative if it saved his life for 2 hours on Wednesdays, let alone 2 more hours on Saturday.

Tito’s plan is simple… MOVE AEW Collision to Mondays, while moving Impact Wrestling either to Wednesdays or even Mondays.

By my plan, it frees up Thursday and Saturday Nights from any mainstream wrestling program. Furthermore, it boosts the wrestling fanbases on Mondays and possibly Wednesday nights. Then, let the competition flow and maybe quality will follow it.

But what do I know? I just watched WCW and WWE grow a COMBINED wrestling fanbase that was 100% appreciative to have wrestling as “one and done” on Monday Nights, while letting us enjoy other content during the rest of the week while also giving us lives.

Sorry, but if you’re consuming WWE on Mondays, NXT on Tuesdays, AEW on Wednesdays, TNA on Thursdays, and AEW/WWE on Fridays… I’d check your head, especially due to the lack of quality that most of those shows have.

Competition breeds more wrestling viewers, it’s a FACT. Demanding wrestling fans watch wrestling nightly has proven to burn out the wrestling fanbase, which has been shrinking in North America since 2014 after TNA began receiving bad TV contracts and John Cena left.

Plan is simple…

(a) AEW moves Collision to Monday Nights
(b) TNA moves their show to Wednesday Nights

Or hell…

(c) Both AEW and TNA move shows to Monday Night to compete with WWE RAW.

Can you dig it, sucka???

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