5 Reasons NXT Is NOT Better Than WWE (It Just Feels Like It Is)

3. The Length Of Shows

Raw is three hours Long. That 'L' is capitalised for a reason. Every Monday there are three hours of television, every single week. Add an hour of Main Event on Tuesdays, two hours of Smackdown every Friday and you have six hours of WWE programming week after week and that's not even including recap shows and Pay Per Views. Simply, that's product over saturation. That's too much TV for a fan to keep up with. But most fans only really keep with with Raw, and that's fine. The WWE know this, and are OK with it. The shows are put together knowing that about the audience, so that's not a problem. But three hours of Raw every week is too much. It's too much to write coherently, and it's too much to follow as a fan. For proof, let's look at Marvel movie studios. Marvel make billions of dollars. Billions. They do it by releasing two or three movies a year and they know, down to the minute, how to stretch and manipulate the attention span of its audience. They know how long to make the first act of the movie, they know to have a big story moment ("the point of no return") or at least a huge action sequence exactly an hour in, and they know how long the big finale set-piece is to last, almost down to the second. They have the attention span of the audience in the palm of their hand because that way they get to make billions of dollars. Marvel have never made a three hour movie. They know it's too long. And they don't even need to have commercials. The USA Network have forced WWE to make an impossibly long television show to appease advertisers and the WWE know how impossibly long it is. So, every week, they can't make a coherent TV show. They have to assemble a TV show out of individual "moments", knowing full well that sections of the audience are going to tune-out from time to time. But it's worth it, because the money they get from the USA Network and from advertisers allows them to pay to set up cool things like their own WWE Network. Where they can show NXT, a show that doesn't have to do any of that stuff. NXT is an hour long show with no ad breaks that can get you committed to the show for its entirety. That goes a long way to getting you invested in the characters and the story and is something that Raw simply can't do week-to-week, no matter who is writing it, or what wrestlers are on it. Let the NXT creative team write Raw if you like, it'll still be the USA Network that's really in charge.