WWE Goes PG | Moments That Changed Wrestling Forever
3. The After
Hatred.
Misguided hatred, but hatred.
Lifers felt hatred for two letters, having finally been able to create a singular boogeyman to justify/explain away what was bordering on a decade of diminishing returns since the last boom. PG - a classification that had been in place back when the most audacious version of World Wrestling Federation boomed in the late 1980s as well as when it struggled to get out of high school gyms and the doldrums writ large in the mid-90s - was now the reason Raw and SmackDown almost always sucked. The fact that the shows still had occasional highs such as a celebrated Shawn Michaels/Chris Jericho feud, a bizarre career renaissance for Triple H when he agreed to a punting to SmackDown in 2009, and the rise and fall and rise again of Jeff Hardy, WWE remained too consistently bad to ever be thought of as all that good. This, per furious protests from disillusioned hardcores on forums, nascent social media platforms and increasingly in buildings themselves, was down to an age classification rating changing overnight in 2008 rather than a product that had declined dramatically in quality since 2001, or if you want to scrutinise it even further, around October 2000.
It's easier to say with the benefit and wisdom and hindsight, but what got lost in the discourse and ultimately quite rudimentary assessment of the situation was a discussion about the profile of the fan complaining the loudest. It revealed something of a universal fan experience for WWE fans of a certain age, that was fast becoming a reckoning. People speak of how different generations view the world (boomers, Gen Xers, millennials and so on) and what it's offered them in life, but this had never been applied to a significant portion of the wrestling fanbase before this point.
WWE in its true original post-Vince McMahon Sr form first exploded in popularity in the 1980s, capturing millions of fans the world over that were also born in that decade. Many - not all - fans that got in deep with the product stuck with it through a mid-1990s malaise. Perhaps they diversified their engagement with the industry, broadened their horizons and even took small breaks, but you never forget your first, and as the market leader, WWE was exactly that to many that were still watching in 2008. But the people that were children in the cartoonish Hulkamania-adjacent superhero era, tweens for the uneven developments of the New Generation and perfectly-placed edgelord teens in the Attitude Era were well into their 20s or beyond by the time John Cena in particular was effectively requiring everybody to reset the clock to the time of training, saying prayers, taking vitamins and believing in yourself. This experience wasn't universal of course, but it did apply to a sizeable majority of the existing WWE Universe. The rap against 'Big Match John' in particular was that the women and children loved him but the longstanding male audience couldn't stick his shtick. It was never quite as binary as that obviously, but the noises from audiences suggested that the dividing lines could mostly be drawn across those groups. To the angry lifers, this was a stick to beat Cena (and, again, PG) with, but even a little bit of introspection might have revealed that this was a good thing. Women had traditionally been ostracised, boxed in and/or marginalised by the business, but that was at long last changing. And pushing a guy the kids love, as will have happened to literally every fan that found it in their childhood? Sacrilege!
WWE was still PG when CM Punk dropped the pipe bomb in Las Vegas, but as the 'Straight Edge Superstar' tried to change the world by sitting on the 'Sin City' stage, he was in fact walking a tightrope attempting to satisfy several different audiences. It's little wonder the carefully-chosen words turned out to be so powerful in 2011. Punk was 32 when he cut the promo, right around or just a little older than the age of the most vociferous against what WWE had come to represent. He also found the best way to colour outside the lines of what had become an even more dreary, overly-scripted stage-managed production by then. "PG" was still the shorthand for the bleak state of the average Raw or SmackDown, filled to the brim with unconvincing, over-familiar performers delivering unconvincing over-familiar material. The iconic promo was none of these things, and widened the chasm between the audience without really expanding the depth of thought as to why the divide existed in the first place. Punk - a paid up WWE Superstar, remember - was now one of a handful that the annoyed audience could perceive as being one of them, as opposed to John Cena and the rest of those PG losers.
That relationship was never recovered. The squashed success of another audience avatar in Daniel Bryan across 2013-14 left even deeper wounds, to such an extent that within just three years of his WrestleMania XXX WWE Championship win, the American independents were as healthy as they'd been in decades, New Japan Pro-Wrestling was commercially and critically thriving on either side of the Pacific Ocean and so many wrestlers were building careers without even involving WWE in their lives that whispers became shouts that there was space for a new promotion. But more on that shortly.
In the 2010s, Stephanie McMahon became Chief Brand Officer and set about making WWE the acceptable face of Americana, with the guiding principal revealed in her mask-off "Philanthropy is the future of marketing" tweet in 2015. By then, the company had worked with various charities and community projects in the interest of reshaping what the brand represented, echoed by a safe and solid product on television that wouldn't serve to undermine any positive messaging. In the real world, wrestler deaths and stories of dire decline thankfully diminished, and while WWE softening its style guide couldn't be held entirely responsible through it, a good majority of those that worked through this era are around and in decent enough fettle to tell the tale as opposed to many of the men and women that gritted their teeth in the brutal periods that came before.
WWE, steered by several initiates that had little to do with Vince McMahon's warped creative, financially and politically benefited to an enormous degree. Toy giant Mattel gained the master license for the WWE in 2010, having started negotiations in a 2008 that suddenly looked more palatable than the years that came before it. In 2009, Linda McMahon left WWE to run for a seat in the United States Senate from Connecticut as a Republican. She lost to Democrat Richard Blumenthal. She was the Republican nominee for Connecticut's other Senate seat in the 2012 race. She lost to Democrat Chris Murphy. But when the political press and public in general went reaching down the sofa for a disgusting moment or segment to attack her with, she was able to craft a past tense narrative around their clips and barbs. It got her seen, got her known, got her in the Connecticut State Board of Education and eventually got her into Donald Trump's teams for both of his Presidential terms. There could be no greater statement of the power of PG, even if it had absolutely nothing to do with the content of the average edition of Raw or SmackDown.
Ratings continued to go down, attendances rarely spiked other than for the biggest events, and pay-per-view buyrates circled the drain for so long that Vince McMahon himself declared the very medium dead while bigging up the launch of the WWE Network. Meanwhile, the changes the PG guidelines made to the product became indistinguishable from the rest of the toothless garbage McMahon was re-writing 10 minutes before air on a weekly basis. Like everything, time normalised the supposedly seismic change, but protests also quietened down because half the people making them simply stepped away. When All Elite Wrestling formed in 2019, it revealed that the frustrated millennial American wrestling fan was still around, just no longer prepared to tolerate what the marker leader was serving up every Monday. Early AEW was as much about doing what the opposition didn't, resulting in countless quick hits of adrenaline as blood and bad language flowing freely, all to the unbridled joy of reinvigorated live crowds. These were cherries on massive trowel-loads of icing on incredible cakes, of course. AEW thrived from the off because the creative underpinning all of the old stuff was incredibly strong, as opposed to destructively nonsensical. The new wrestling war brought about an entire new set of ebbs and flows, changing shape in a way most unexpected when Vince McMahon resigned in disgrace in 2022 and again in 2024. 2023, not coincidentally, was WWE's best creative year since 2000, with new energy in just about every room and revived joy in the wrestlers going through the curtain. From January 1st through to December 31st of the year, the product was PG. The problem there hadn't ever been two letters, but three - VKM.
Television wrestling has found a new normal in the 2020s to such an extent that F-Bombs slip out on B-shows rather than being debated in advance between creatives and ad reps in meeting rooms. Both majors use blood. AEW is the substantially more liberal of the two, but WWE has gone there often enough that the occasions no longer feel like rule-proving exceptions. WWE skews slightly more child friendly in tone, but neither show goes the distance without at least one segment skirting "family-friendly" lines. As of writing in 2026, Netflix have seemingly tightened up on what they're prepared to broadcast on a standard issue Raw, but even then there are inconsistencies to such an extent that it seems pointless trying to work within whatever the censorship actually is. Perhaps most notably, at absolutely no point during the highs and lows of either company in the last few years has debate centred around what TV Parental Guidelines rating the show gets. Not least when there's Cagematch ones to discuss.
While "The PG Era" has more validity as an actual period of time than "Ruthless Aggression", it would be nice to think that sooner or later, both will be condemned to the dumpster of branding exercises, rather than held aloft as golden days. WWE was useless for too long for nostalgia to work its magic on all the slop. The barometers of good taste and decency change all the time anyway, but a wrestling fan's desire to actually enjoy the show remains mostly insatiable. As long as companies cater to that, the age of admittance - wrestling is for everybody, after all - will hopefully never be particularly relevant again.