10 Ways WWE Treats Its Fans Like Idiots

10. Constant Recaps

Let’s start with the thing that almost certainly comes to mind when you think about WWE treating its audience like children. We’ve heard for years about Vince McMahon’s tendency to suddenly get bored of an idea or desire to tear up scripts on a whim hours before a show airs, but that shouldn’t mean that the company assumes its audience has a complete lack of attention span as well.

Doing things that imply as such, like the never ending recaps of moments that just happened, actually has a Pavlovian effect on your viewers. You’re telling them that it doesn’t matter if they pay that much attention because they’ll just be shown what happened again and again anyway.

Whether WWE fans get the luxury of a commercial break or a backstage segment before the recap shows or not, they’re obnoxious at the best of times and total tedium at worst. It’s become frustratingly common that a segment will finish, be recapped and then after coming back from commercial will be recapped again.

Filling a three hour episode of Raw is a challenging thing for any booker but cheap tricks like spending minutes of the program showing previous events is just tiring. Fans may as well go and watch the YouTube clips of the show as they’ll see all the major moments - but only see them once!