10 Reasons Why Your Friends Don't Watch Wrestling Anymore
2. TV-PG
A common rallying cry of lapsed WWE fans is that "The PG Era" has sapped the company of its in-your-face attitude. This is something of a misconception -- after all, HLA and Katie Vick were as non-PG as WWE ever got, and those angles did nothing but turn off fans. There's no reason that a wrestling company can't put out a compelling product that respects its customers' intelligence and still maintains a PG rating.
Don't tell that to WWE, though -- the move to PG in 2008 seemed to be little more than a heads-up that the insipid raunchiness that fans had come to associate with the promotion needed to be replaced with equally bad "comedy" involving terrible writing and, more often than not, little people. It's not a new concept -- from Hillbilly Jim to Doink to Hornswoggle, there's not much that can make a wrestling fan question his hobby as quickly as Vince McMahon's idea of humor -- but it's become more child-oriented than ever in the PG Era, and that's caused many older fans to see the rating as a sign of a paradigm shift.
In short, a PG rating doesn't need to hurt a wrestling show, but WWE makes sure it does.