Triple H Says Less Commercials Are Coming To WWE Raw, Talks Balancing Raw & SmackDown
During a recent appearance on “The Press Box” podcast, WWE Chief Content Officer Paul “Triple H” Levesque hyped the premiere episode of RAW on Netflix scheduled for January 6.
Triple H was asked to share his thoughts on both WWE’s perspective and Netflix’s viewpoint about commercials during WWE RAW broadcasts on the streaming platform.
He said, “Look, [laughs], my guess on their part would be money is part of this. They’re paying us a lot of money. They’re in the business of making money, so they’ve got to have ad times and they’ve fit to sell things, even though it’s a subscription product. There’s other factors that go into that for them. For us, to some degree, it’s a funny thing. Sometimes, they tell us, for whatever reason, ‘Hey, you can have the entire first hour commercial-free.’ I know that nobody out there that watches the show, unless they do television, will understand this because they hear this and think, ‘That’s the most ridiculous thing ever.’ Commercial-free live television is incredibly difficult. People don’t understand that. To be able to go from, this match ends, you gotta get them out of the arena, you gotta go backstage, you gotta go to this other stuff, you gotta be ready to go on every single thing, in real time, in that moment. If something crashes, if somebody gets injured, there’s no place to go. There’s no commercial to go to. There’s no, ‘Hey, we can go to this.’ You can only go to so many backstage segments. If they’re not ready to go, something happens and you gotta get out in the ring, if no one’s ready to go, ‘Alright, just run a package or something.’ It’s incredibly difficult to do. So having those breaks in there to some degree is helpful. There’s less commercial time. It’s going to be more manageable, at least for now. Anything can change, but at least for now. I also think this will be a work on progress for us. The formatting is slightly different here. How we work with things is slightly different, so it’s gonna take us a minute also to get to where we feel comfortable and we feel smooth getting in and out of everything and going to where we need to go. But I think it’ll be a better experience for people. It’s just a part of what we do. It makes me laugh whenever people say, ‘There’s so many commercials this week.’ Well, same exact amount of commercials we had last week. I’ll give you that maybe we didn’t do as good of a job of managing the time in between the commercials, but it’s the same amount of commercials. We didn’t change anything. The format’s the same.”
On the same podcast, Triple H commented on balancing RAW and SmackDown while being flexible with his plans when necessary. The WWE COO spoke about the difficulties associated with his role.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On booking several big shows in quick succession and balancing the main roster brands: “We’ve sort of been working through this for a long time. Look, is there worry? There’s worry about everything for me on where this goes and what it does. But I can not recall a time in the business, least on my end, where we sort of, if you look at the last few months, you did Survivor Series, you came right off of that with Saturday Night’s Main Event, you did the holidays. Once you got on the other side of the holidays, well, you have Netflix on the sixth. Great, but you also don’t want SmackDown to feel like less than, so I wanted that first episode of SmackDown of the new year to feel big as well. So you’ve got [Netflix on] the sixth. Well, yeah, but I still have another show on Friday this week. Then when talent are talking about it, or the writers are talking about it, it’s like, ‘Well geez, I really should be on the episode, I should be on that first episode on the sixth. Well, we have an episode on the 13th too. You’re going to be on the second episode, and you’re going to main event the second episode instead of being a piece of the first episode.
“So it’s trying to space that stuff all out, and how do you get ahead of the storytelling to try to make sure that there’s enough storytelling to blend across things. When fans look at it, and they’re like, ‘I don’t understand why this match, it’s right there, why didn’t they put that on that card? It’s ridiculous.’ Yeah, it’s also a three-hour show, and there’s one seven days later. So just that one we’ll hold a week, and you’ll get to this one. I think it’s also okay like we’re doing things now. You see us promoting Cody Rhodes and Kevin Owens for the Rumble, and we’re not even past January 6th yet. We also have all the episodes in between and another Saturday Night’s Main Event before we even get to the Rumble. Those are the puzzles to try to put together. So when you start thinking about that, all these episodes leading up to, or leading up to and beyond Netflix, all the SmackDown episodes, it can’t feel like it becomes the B show with all the buzz around Netflix.”
On planning ahead for the road to WrestleMania: “Saturday Night’s Main Event again, the Rumble. When you come out of the Rumble, you got Elimination Chamber, and I think once Elimination Chamber happens, you’re six or seven weeks until WrestleMania, like you said, your foot is on the gas. It’s trying to be judicious about how…you can never just put it to the floor and try to run the track. You’re going to go off the road on the curves. It just doesn’t make sense. You gotta go as fast as you can, but it’s gotta be controlled. You have to know where things are going, and you have to long-term plan. If you don’t, you’re doomed. It’s the way it works. You have to be disciplined. You have to look at things. The biggest trick to me is, you can have that stuff all laid out and have it be, ‘I know where everything’s going, this is great, we’ve got all these shows templated out, and they all look really good, stacked in the beginning of the year into WrestleMania.’ All that stuff.
“Then Bronson Reed breaks his ankle, and you’re like, ‘Ah, man.’ One domino falls, and the whole row goes down. You’re like, ‘Alright, we’ll, scrap all that, and let’s start over.’ We sit down again and try to look for the next, ‘Okay, start over. From here to WrestleMania, you get that piece taken out, where are we going?’ It’s a part of the game, it’s a part of the dance. But that’s the beauty of live TV and what we do. The great thing is, it’s flexible, and you pivot. I have a belief, and I said this with last year’s chaos going into WrestleMania and all that, I truly believe that out of that chaos, greatness comes. It’s been proven to me over and over and over again that a lot of times, you plan this stuff out, and you think it’s great, something happens, it all gets thrown up in the air, and then you come up with something, and then you get there, you’re like, actually, this is better. This is better than what we had. This kind of worked out great in the end. You just always have to be on your toes thinking.”
