TNA Impact Wrestling Canceled By Destination America

It looks like the marriage between TNA Wrestling and Destination America is going to be a short one. According to the Wrestling Observer, Destination America made the decision to cancel all TNA Wrestling shows, including their signature show Impact, in September. TNA signed a deal with Destination America in January and it was for two years, but there was an opt out clause in the contract for DA to get out after nine months and apparently that's what is going to happen. This comes on the heels of last week's announcement that starting on June 3, Destination America was going to move Impact to Wednesdays instead of Fridays to help them get more viewers. It was a logical move since more people watch TV on Wednesday compared to Friday. However, that wasn't the only thing that was decided. According to Meltzer, it was at that point that Destination America decided to cancel all TNA programming. When the deal was originally announced, the plan was for Destination America to show a number of TNA shows during the week with best of specials, sitdown interviews with talent that would be featured on other shows and other kind of programming that they would develop. As the months went by, they started cutting the TNA shows until it was just Impact and now we find out that Impact is going too. There were two reasons given as to why Destination America wanted to cancel Impact: 1) Ratings were good, but not good enough to justify the cost of programming and 2) Advertisers specifically did not want to advertise during Impact Wrestling. It's always been tough for wrestling shows to get quality advertising. It's terrible news for TNA because when they were looking for a new home late last year after being dropped by Spike TV, apparently there weren't a lot of channels that wanted to show their product. Destination America was one of the few networks that apparently had an interest and a lot of people in the United States didn't watch the channel or even know that they had the channel. It was a big risk for TNA because they had to rely on an unknown commodity to help them grow. Now it turns out that moving to Destination America was a big mistake.

What's interesting is that apparently TNA President Dixie Carter was aware of the news last week and didn't inform most of her employees about it. Most of the wrestlers likely found out after the Observer came out and are probably upset that they weren't told about it, as they should be. It was also noted that while the decision hasn't been finalized, it's expected that Destination America will stick with the decision since they sent out a memo to to the staff informing them of the news. Meltzer called it an ongoing story although it seems unlikely that Destination America will change their minds about it. As for the future of TNA Wrestling, nobody really knows at this point. They have shows taped through the end of June although if they don't have TV in the United States for much longer, the end could be near. We'll have more news on this in the coming weeks and months.