A Beginner's Guide To WWE's Netflix Era

As of January 2025 the WWE Network is mostly no more. All episodes of weekly flagship TV show Monday Night Raw are now shown on Netflix alongside the monthly Premium Live Events such as WrestleMania and the Royal Rumble. In addition to this a huge collection of past shows and programming have also made the jump across meaning that the WWE is now available to a far wider audience than it ever has been before. You might have only subscribed to watch Squid Game but you can watch SummerSlam too if you wanted to. 

If you re brand new to the world of WWE or maybe you have a passing knowledge of Stone Cold Steve Austin, Hulk Hogan and The Undertaker and have long since lapsed then this amount of content may seem overwhelming. WrestleMania dates back to 1985 and the wrestling business as a whole has gone through multiple changes since. To watch everything in sequence would take extended levels of free time that most mere mortals simply don't have.

If you want a crash course however then this list will provide some quality viewing for you and give you a baseline knowledge of company history, starting with one of its best ever shows...

Wrestling is pretty simple right? There's the good guys, then there's the bad guys and everybody is happy when the good guys win. What this doesn't take into account however is what happens when an audience completely ignores what promoter wants them to do and flips the whole match. One of the biggest examples of this is the main event of Canadian Stampede. 

Bret 'Hitman' Hart started his singles career in WWE as a beloved hero. His championship reigns were always punctuated by matches in which he squared off against opponents bigger and stronger than he. That all changed during his match against Stone Cold Steve Austin as WrestleMania 13 in 1997. 

Feeling disrespected as he saw fans start to warm to Austin instead of him Bret unleashed a new brutal side, infamously refusing to release the Sharpshooter as Austin passed out through the pain. Bret then went on to apologise to all his fans apart from the American ones. The main event of this show is an utterly chaotic five versus five match that sees Bret Hart team with his brother Owen, Jim Neidhart, The British Bulldog and Brian Pillman to take on the American team of Steve Austin, Ken Shamrock, Goldust and The Legion of Doom.

In his home country of Canada, he and his Hart Foundation allies are treated as if they could walk on water whilst Austin's team experience a hostile reception. What follows is a twenty five minute long barn burner of a match in which the crowd remain invested in every single moment. It's also only the last of a five match card so it's a snappy, to the point show. The other matches fair quite well also as The Undertaker defended his WWF Championship against Vader, Mankind takes on Triple H in a match that goes all over the arena and it also features a rare WWF appearance of The Great Sasuke as he takes on Taka Michinoku.