10 Things Wrong With Every Episode Of WWE Raw
4. Epic Length
Three hours is a long time - so much so that major Hollywood studios are notoriously wary of allowing feature films to even approach it.
Even two hours is a long time. When WCW first introduced Thunder, many industry observers perceived at as the company's death knell. They weren't wrong. SmackDown! was viewed with similar caution - and when the company lost its lustre, it became a distant second to the flagship. It was almost as if watching a product half the length of the Lord Of The Rings trilogy every week was too much to bear.
Nitro just about justified its epic duration, pre-2000 at least, because it celebrated the diversity of wrestling. That might have been because it was so comparatively deregulated that no style, no matter how dangerous or spectacular, was verboten. Regardless, the end result was still the same: action just diverse enough to not outstay its welcome.
The (main roster) WWE style remains so homogenised that it cannot luxuriate in such expansiveness - and the writing is so repetitive that the shows as a whole tend to bleed into one another. Some might as well last nine hours.