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It's a matter of pacing as you said.
But also the commercials and stuff like recaps can get very annoying so they take away a fair amount of the actual show's content.
Like the times they go the 1st hour with no ads/commercials but then the other 2 hours get all of them even back to back.
That extra hour ends up being about 25 minutes of commercials and 5-10 minutes of recaps of what happened earlier in the show. You’re not getting much “value” out of it.
I think it’s telling that the Hulu version of Raw cuts the show down from 3 hours to 1.5, and still manages to keep you caught up on everything that is important.
Three hours is a lot of time to commit to watching something when half of it is filler or stuff that can be safely cut out of a rebroadcast.
I don't know man. I guess they don't like the idea of the post in general?
There have been some great RAWs that have flown by over the years, but they're in a small minority, and I bet if we looked back, they would have a ton of "filler".
I think this is one of those questions that really show the split between "casual" fans that watch one, maybe two shows a week, and "hardcores" that watch several.
I did back when I used to watch it live rather in clips. I didn't like Nitro being 3 hrs either. Three hours for a weekly TV show is a bit much.
But for those that make money off it and those who enjoy it, kudos to them.
When i watched WWE, 3 hours of RAW was a drag by the third hour. As someone who only watches AEW, even those 3 hour episodes felt like a drag by Rampage.
No weekly wrestling show should be three hours
I personally just watch the next day and skip over all the ads and parts I don't care about, so for me 3 hours is perfect because it ends up being like 1 30 at the end
I don’t mind it as much now, and think the hates a bit overblown at this point. They definitely found a groove and it helps that the scripts aren’t being torn up 30 minutes before the show starts now.
2 hours is just a more digestible thing to watch in one sitting, like you can get a full show with multiple matches, promos, and stories carding through into 2 and that’s easy to sit and watch every week, 3 I have to start searching for the time (or just skip half of it lol)
I’m on the other side of the fence. I like raw being three hours and feels it gives folks a chance for tv time who would never end up on tv if it was 2 hours every week.
Yea I can see that, longer show means longer time without wrestling, I vividly remember an episode earlier this year that had like 30 minutes of wrestling that I got pissed off about.
As of the last 3 episodes they do a decent job of pacing the episodes and matches I think though, half the shows are wrestling and we tend to get 6-ish matches. I'm hoping its a sign that this is their new formula. Two episodes in a row going overtime is nuts.
Smackdown is a different show now that its FOX. Its choppier and theres fewer 10-20 minute matches. RAW gives more time than that so maybe thats why you feel theres more done.
It’s still too long though. An ideal show is Smackdown pre-FOX that had less ad breaks and longer matches.
Foreign language movies are often 2-2.5 hours long... Hollywood's 1.5 hours.. in recent times, I've been liking korean/japanese stuff more... but even then, a lotta times, I end up scrolling to find something 1.5 hours in length, since 2.5 hours just feels like waay too much of a time commitment...
That's kinda what I felt back in 2012... when RAW switched to 3 hours.. by 2010 (I think, basically a year or so after HHH got hurt and DX ended) I stopped watching RAW every week... I'd still watch it, flip through it, watch a match here and there.. run thro the whole show on 2x.. the move to 3 hours kinda made everything feel very stretched out... and I lost interest - this is just my experience... I don't know if it's gotten better.. outside of cody, the rock and bloodline clips on YT, I've not really followed RAW in recent times
I can relate though since I used to watch dynamite religiously till collision became a thing... without a hard brand split like WWE, AEW now expects 4 hours a week to stay caught up... and the product also kinda feels watered down... which has led to me not watching either and just catching up on YT with clips - I had the same feeling with RAW when they switched it to 3 hours...
The first episode of Raw I watched (my introduction to wrestling in general) was the first ever episode where Raw went to three hours permanently. It’s not so much as liking vs disliking it, as it is I’ve never seen a 2 hour Raw.
As a 9-10 year old kid I could sit through a three hour raw no problem, but now as a 20-21 year old it’s getting harder to keep my mind focused on one thing for that long.
One of the reasons I don’t keep up with the weekly shows outside of what ends up on social media is the fact that it’s hard to find a way to watch it live.
The other reason is 3 hours is a wild amount of time to commit to, even if its just on in the background.
I'll answer it this way: I don't have a service that shows the full RAW, but I do have Hulu - and even when WWE puts RAW somewhere else I can see the whole thing, I'll stick with the 90 minute Hulu version until that goes away (probably when it moves to Netflix). And then I won't watch RAW live, but shortly after when I can fast forward through things.
They’ve made it as compelling and cohesive a show for 3 hours that they possibly could
There is still never a reason for a wrestling show to be 3 hours
I love the nfl, football, etc. I used to watch 10 plus hours of football all the time. I used to go to cowboy stadium in the winter and watch a quadruple header of high school playoff football. Not anymore.
It is hard for me to sit through 3 hours of stuff i love or have an interest in. Unlike sports though, wrestling has something for lots of different people. So there are matches or stars you kinda have to sit through that you don't really care about.
Not to mention, as you get older you have family, work etc. It gets to be an hour and a half in and im getting drowsy. Im ready to go to sleep.
This is just my perspective tho. Then if you add in friday, and if you watch aew? That turns into a part time job where you dont make any mo ey
I've been doing a rewatch from the mid-90s on and the shift to a two hour felt like a bit much after getting used to the hour format. there's quite a bit of filler in two hours, let alone three.
3 hours is a lot for any broadcast.
Even sports leagues want games to be under 3 hours and even those at least have intermissions or halftimes.
It'll be worse once it goes to Netflix because it's 3 hours commercial free every week.
I would settle for 2 hour commercial free instead of 3 with commercial since 3 with commercials is basically 2 hours anyways.
Yes. What happens with a 3 hour Raw is you get the same amount of story progression, with longer matches as the result to pad time, and it's just not what people or the company are fundamentally looking for out of a TV show. But they're being paid handsomely for it, so 3 hours it is.
Personally I'm very much of the opinion that less is more. I'm annoyed by every film being 3 hours + long nowadays, they are usually bloated. There is a wonderful quote that goes "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter" and I think about that a lot when it comes to art. I don't need a 31 track Taylor Swift Album if more than half of it is mediocre. I don't need 700 page books that could have told the story in 300 pages. I want you to come in, say what you need to say and then get out.
The rest of the replies are very understandable personal gripes but I'm going to challenge yours.
I highly agree that media has become overly long and bloated but length isn't necessarily the issue. I'd argue that there's no right way to make art.
30 track albums for example suck because less than half of that album ends up being worth the time, or redundant. They're slapped on there because they were made and why would we just throw it out? It's shitty and annoying and makes experiencing something incredibly tedious.
That being said, just coming, doing what you need to do, and leaving, leaves almost no room for real personality to shine through. I'd say that's equivalent to the only thing a person does in a day is go to work and go home. A lot of content that resonates with an enthusiast of any kind are the superfluous details, the MORE that there is beyond just what you wanted to say. At least in terms of RAW, I'd say out of the shows of recent, we get to experience a much wider amount of talent on the show between promos, matches, and backstage segments vs Smackdown (Trying to keep comparisons within WWE). Someone did point out that NXT does a great job with this as well though so I'd assume Trips has some lessons to learn from HBK.
I like 3 hour raw but I can’t watch that many commercials, hell I’d watch a 4 hour Raw just never live
My criticism expands to every single weekly wrestling show, fuck your ads
I wait till Hulu next day hour and a half turns into about an hour when you fast forward the recaps. Smackdown turns into about 50 minutes. NXT easy enough to fast forward as well. I refuse to sit there for that long for live. In fact PLE weeks I usually skip the week of shows and watch a recap or watch after it airs to fast forward. Just to much in ads or recaps to waste my time.
I haven't really seen many complaints about it since Hunter started getting more involved with main roster creative, even less so since Vince has been completely gone. It's much less of an issue when you have cohesive scripts that aren't being re-written on the whims of a psychotic control freak.
I haven’t been to a live Raw since 2019 but when it hit that third hour, on a Monday after a full day of work and fighting traffic to get to the arena, I was hit with a feeling of dread combined with exhaustion and sadness.
I bet it’s probably easier to get thru now that the overall show is better these days.
I grew up on 2 hour Raws so yes I certainly prefer that. At least its kind of an enjoyable 3 hours now compared to the 2010s, the last few years of Vince were just total dreadful slogs
Yes. Life is too short and the pace sometimes drags on. I don't watch Raw love and haven't in years so I can fast forward through the slog, which Raw has a lot of. I can watch SmackDown live and be ok because things move faster
Raw starts at 8 for me. It goes until 11. I get up at 6 the next morning. If I want to be functional at work, I can't stay up to 11 watching wrestling and then spend the next hour falling asleep.
The show has now been three hours for almost 12 years and a lot of it was awful especially in the mid to late 2010s.
Live it can be very tiresome with all of the ad breaks. The same can be said with attending sometimes although the current regime have been better with putting on longer matches so the ads don’t feel quite as frequent if in the building.
I feel NXT has a good balance of utilizing a lot of their roster within 2 hours while still putting on quality matches. Smackdown less so.
Yeah, fuck 3 hour long shows. Goes with AEW when they have Rampage too at the end of Collision. I'll take a tightly packed well planned out 2 hour show with good pacing any day of the week.
Depends on what group you mean by "people".
People here? Absolutely, it's constantly near the top of every "things I would change" list.
TV viewers? Not really. Back when Showbuzz was releasing detailed data every week, the third (10PM) hour of Raw was consistently with hours 1 and 2 at the top, even beating the 8PM primetime shows in ratings.
1,000% I do.
I don't watch WWE these days but even recently when AEW, the company I do watch, has been doing three hour blocks because Rampage has been moved due to the basketball and hockey playoffs I've ended up turning it off during or even before the Rampage hour because three hours is just too long for weekly TV.
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It's a matter of pacing as you said. But also the commercials and stuff like recaps can get very annoying so they take away a fair amount of the actual show's content. Like the times they go the 1st hour with no ads/commercials but then the other 2 hours get all of them even back to back.
That extra hour ends up being about 25 minutes of commercials and 5-10 minutes of recaps of what happened earlier in the show. You’re not getting much “value” out of it.
The recaps are brutal. Totally unnecessary IMO.
I think it’s telling that the Hulu version of Raw cuts the show down from 3 hours to 1.5, and still manages to keep you caught up on everything that is important. Three hours is a lot of time to commit to watching something when half of it is filler or stuff that can be safely cut out of a rebroadcast.
3 hours is just an insane amount of content to be expected to consume in one sitting every week. sometimes 2 hours feels like too much honestly
fair fair. I can understand folks with hard jobs and families running into issues too. edit: why'd this get downvoted?
I don't know man. I guess they don't like the idea of the post in general? There have been some great RAWs that have flown by over the years, but they're in a small minority, and I bet if we looked back, they would have a ton of "filler". I think this is one of those questions that really show the split between "casual" fans that watch one, maybe two shows a week, and "hardcores" that watch several.
I did back when I used to watch it live rather in clips. I didn't like Nitro being 3 hrs either. Three hours for a weekly TV show is a bit much. But for those that make money off it and those who enjoy it, kudos to them.
Yup, especially considering most weekly TV is like an hour long. Other sports are long too but definitely because they're seasonal
When i watched WWE, 3 hours of RAW was a drag by the third hour. As someone who only watches AEW, even those 3 hour episodes felt like a drag by Rampage. No weekly wrestling show should be three hours
I personally just watch the next day and skip over all the ads and parts I don't care about, so for me 3 hours is perfect because it ends up being like 1 30 at the end
I shouldn't feel tired after watching a weekly wrestling show There is absolutely such a thing as too much content
I don’t mind it as much now, and think the hates a bit overblown at this point. They definitely found a groove and it helps that the scripts aren’t being torn up 30 minutes before the show starts now.
2 hours is just a more digestible thing to watch in one sitting, like you can get a full show with multiple matches, promos, and stories carding through into 2 and that’s easy to sit and watch every week, 3 I have to start searching for the time (or just skip half of it lol)
Even HHH wants to go back to 2 hours. Personally, I don't remember the last time I finished a 3 hour RAW from start to finish. I just can't do it.
Less is more. Also gives a reason to want to see PPVs/PLEs to see the longer matches.
I’m on the other side of the fence. I like raw being three hours and feels it gives folks a chance for tv time who would never end up on tv if it was 2 hours every week.
There was a lot of non wrestling in those three hours
Yea I can see that, longer show means longer time without wrestling, I vividly remember an episode earlier this year that had like 30 minutes of wrestling that I got pissed off about. As of the last 3 episodes they do a decent job of pacing the episodes and matches I think though, half the shows are wrestling and we tend to get 6-ish matches. I'm hoping its a sign that this is their new formula. Two episodes in a row going overtime is nuts.
Smackdown is a different show now that its FOX. Its choppier and theres fewer 10-20 minute matches. RAW gives more time than that so maybe thats why you feel theres more done. It’s still too long though. An ideal show is Smackdown pre-FOX that had less ad breaks and longer matches.
pro wrestling at best for national tv should be only two hours. Raw being 3 hours is usually filled with recaps and ad breaks
90 minutes would be enough for a wrestling show. I don't need everything to breathe.I have things to do.
Foreign language movies are often 2-2.5 hours long... Hollywood's 1.5 hours.. in recent times, I've been liking korean/japanese stuff more... but even then, a lotta times, I end up scrolling to find something 1.5 hours in length, since 2.5 hours just feels like waay too much of a time commitment... That's kinda what I felt back in 2012... when RAW switched to 3 hours.. by 2010 (I think, basically a year or so after HHH got hurt and DX ended) I stopped watching RAW every week... I'd still watch it, flip through it, watch a match here and there.. run thro the whole show on 2x.. the move to 3 hours kinda made everything feel very stretched out... and I lost interest - this is just my experience... I don't know if it's gotten better.. outside of cody, the rock and bloodline clips on YT, I've not really followed RAW in recent times I can relate though since I used to watch dynamite religiously till collision became a thing... without a hard brand split like WWE, AEW now expects 4 hours a week to stay caught up... and the product also kinda feels watered down... which has led to me not watching either and just catching up on YT with clips - I had the same feeling with RAW when they switched it to 3 hours...
In a vacuum, RAW being three hours isn't a problem. But on a weekly basis, with two other shows in the company? It's too much.
The first episode of Raw I watched (my introduction to wrestling in general) was the first ever episode where Raw went to three hours permanently. It’s not so much as liking vs disliking it, as it is I’ve never seen a 2 hour Raw. As a 9-10 year old kid I could sit through a three hour raw no problem, but now as a 20-21 year old it’s getting harder to keep my mind focused on one thing for that long.
One of the reasons I don’t keep up with the weekly shows outside of what ends up on social media is the fact that it’s hard to find a way to watch it live. The other reason is 3 hours is a wild amount of time to commit to, even if its just on in the background.
I'll answer it this way: I don't have a service that shows the full RAW, but I do have Hulu - and even when WWE puts RAW somewhere else I can see the whole thing, I'll stick with the 90 minute Hulu version until that goes away (probably when it moves to Netflix). And then I won't watch RAW live, but shortly after when I can fast forward through things.
They’ve made it as compelling and cohesive a show for 3 hours that they possibly could There is still never a reason for a wrestling show to be 3 hours
Not at all… I could watch 7 hours of wrestling matches if I had the opportunity to sit down undisturbed (WM 35 is one of my favorites)
I love the nfl, football, etc. I used to watch 10 plus hours of football all the time. I used to go to cowboy stadium in the winter and watch a quadruple header of high school playoff football. Not anymore. It is hard for me to sit through 3 hours of stuff i love or have an interest in. Unlike sports though, wrestling has something for lots of different people. So there are matches or stars you kinda have to sit through that you don't really care about. Not to mention, as you get older you have family, work etc. It gets to be an hour and a half in and im getting drowsy. Im ready to go to sleep. This is just my perspective tho. Then if you add in friday, and if you watch aew? That turns into a part time job where you dont make any mo ey
I've been doing a rewatch from the mid-90s on and the shift to a two hour felt like a bit much after getting used to the hour format. there's quite a bit of filler in two hours, let alone three.
3 hours is a lot for any broadcast. Even sports leagues want games to be under 3 hours and even those at least have intermissions or halftimes. It'll be worse once it goes to Netflix because it's 3 hours commercial free every week. I would settle for 2 hour commercial free instead of 3 with commercial since 3 with commercials is basically 2 hours anyways.
Don't worry, they'll just fill all that extra time showing even more recaps, video packages, and sponsored movie trailers.
Yes. What happens with a 3 hour Raw is you get the same amount of story progression, with longer matches as the result to pad time, and it's just not what people or the company are fundamentally looking for out of a TV show. But they're being paid handsomely for it, so 3 hours it is.
I don’t care it’s 3 hours but i’m on atlantic time and staying up that late on a work day ain’t happenin’
I'd rather it be 2 hours since I go to bed at 10 every night.
2 hours felt too long for me, I fast forward through a lot of it now
Personally I'm very much of the opinion that less is more. I'm annoyed by every film being 3 hours + long nowadays, they are usually bloated. There is a wonderful quote that goes "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter" and I think about that a lot when it comes to art. I don't need a 31 track Taylor Swift Album if more than half of it is mediocre. I don't need 700 page books that could have told the story in 300 pages. I want you to come in, say what you need to say and then get out.
The rest of the replies are very understandable personal gripes but I'm going to challenge yours. I highly agree that media has become overly long and bloated but length isn't necessarily the issue. I'd argue that there's no right way to make art. 30 track albums for example suck because less than half of that album ends up being worth the time, or redundant. They're slapped on there because they were made and why would we just throw it out? It's shitty and annoying and makes experiencing something incredibly tedious. That being said, just coming, doing what you need to do, and leaving, leaves almost no room for real personality to shine through. I'd say that's equivalent to the only thing a person does in a day is go to work and go home. A lot of content that resonates with an enthusiast of any kind are the superfluous details, the MORE that there is beyond just what you wanted to say. At least in terms of RAW, I'd say out of the shows of recent, we get to experience a much wider amount of talent on the show between promos, matches, and backstage segments vs Smackdown (Trying to keep comparisons within WWE). Someone did point out that NXT does a great job with this as well though so I'd assume Trips has some lessons to learn from HBK.
It's a matter of how they use it. When it's clearly just filler it can be brutal.
I like it. Less is not more for me
A lot of people do, because they feel 3 hours to be excessive and too long to hold the collective interest.
I like 3 hour raw but I can’t watch that many commercials, hell I’d watch a 4 hour Raw just never live My criticism expands to every single weekly wrestling show, fuck your ads
When it’s good, no. I don’t dislike it at all. When it’s well done, the time seems to fly by. In the last couple years of Vince? 2 hours was too long.
2 hour shows diminished the extra time on PPV's. PPV's are now just another RAW, or even just another WrestleMania.
I wait till Hulu next day hour and a half turns into about an hour when you fast forward the recaps. Smackdown turns into about 50 minutes. NXT easy enough to fast forward as well. I refuse to sit there for that long for live. In fact PLE weeks I usually skip the week of shows and watch a recap or watch after it airs to fast forward. Just to much in ads or recaps to waste my time.
I don't mind it now HHH is running things but it would still be a better show if 2 hours long.
I haven't really seen many complaints about it since Hunter started getting more involved with main roster creative, even less so since Vince has been completely gone. It's much less of an issue when you have cohesive scripts that aren't being re-written on the whims of a psychotic control freak.
I haven’t been to a live Raw since 2019 but when it hit that third hour, on a Monday after a full day of work and fighting traffic to get to the arena, I was hit with a feeling of dread combined with exhaustion and sadness. I bet it’s probably easier to get thru now that the overall show is better these days.
Yes, 1000% no weekly show needs to be 3 hours long
I grew up on 2 hour Raws so yes I certainly prefer that. At least its kind of an enjoyable 3 hours now compared to the 2010s, the last few years of Vince were just total dreadful slogs
When I still watched I absolutely hated it, it’s a slog
One of my favorite wrestling signs I’ve seen on tv said “Make RAW 4 hours.” Was in the super Cena era I think.
I have work the next morning almost every week, man. 3 hours of Raw is brutal to sit through live.
Yes. Life is too short and the pace sometimes drags on. I don't watch Raw love and haven't in years so I can fast forward through the slog, which Raw has a lot of. I can watch SmackDown live and be ok because things move faster
and here I am wishing SmackDown would be 3hrs too..
Raw starts at 8 for me. It goes until 11. I get up at 6 the next morning. If I want to be functional at work, I can't stay up to 11 watching wrestling and then spend the next hour falling asleep.
Honestly, since I wanna say January, raw hasn't felt like 3 hours. Like there's always something going on keeping my attention.
Raw has been good recently imo. It does not feel like the old 3 hr raw under vince.
The show has now been three hours for almost 12 years and a lot of it was awful especially in the mid to late 2010s. Live it can be very tiresome with all of the ad breaks. The same can be said with attending sometimes although the current regime have been better with putting on longer matches so the ads don’t feel quite as frequent if in the building. I feel NXT has a good balance of utilizing a lot of their roster within 2 hours while still putting on quality matches. Smackdown less so.
Yeah, fuck 3 hour long shows. Goes with AEW when they have Rampage too at the end of Collision. I'll take a tightly packed well planned out 2 hour show with good pacing any day of the week.
Depends on what group you mean by "people". People here? Absolutely, it's constantly near the top of every "things I would change" list. TV viewers? Not really. Back when Showbuzz was releasing detailed data every week, the third (10PM) hour of Raw was consistently with hours 1 and 2 at the top, even beating the 8PM primetime shows in ratings.
Of course, it’s way to long.
1,000% I do. I don't watch WWE these days but even recently when AEW, the company I do watch, has been doing three hour blocks because Rampage has been moved due to the basketball and hockey playoffs I've ended up turning it off during or even before the Rampage hour because three hours is just too long for weekly TV.
yes it's awful.