RAW has been 3 hours for nearly 2 years...

[CM Punk]

Yet, they still suck at utilizing all 3 hours. Like, we can usually have less recaps and whatever, but I think the mid carders should at least have promo battles for their respective mid card title. Usually they'll just throw the champion or competitor on commentary, and then they would taunt them at the end of the match. [HASHTAG]#Lame[/HASHTAG] [HASHTAG]#ShitBuild[/HASHTAG]

Plus, fuck this Hornswoggle/Torito bullshit. No one wants to see that crap, take it to Saturday Morning Slam.

But for real, you'd think they would utilize all 3 hours better by now.

 

[Aids Johnson]

kewl

 

[Stopspot]

I blame Kevin Dunn. Dude has been the head producer for RAW since it started but the dude hates wrestling (ironic place of employment).

 

[Brad.]

It's only a problem if you watch it live. As it airs at 1am to 4 in the UK, I rarely stay up to watch all of it, so I don't mind it being 3 hours.

 

[Snowman1]

This isn't really a 3 hours argument (that just makes the problem worse) as much as it is that it's the same 2 hour show it was before being stretched into 3 hours. That's how Raw has been for a long time. There's 3 feuds on the show, one for Cena, one for the other established person on the show (then Orton, now Evolution) and a third for a person they're pushing (now Bryan). And while the ridiculous amount of filler has increased, so has the length of matches, so yay.

To go back to my arguments with WacoKid, I don't think a weekly 3 hour show, even when well-booked, can hold your attention until the end of the show. It's too long. Period. I'll keep saying it, Hulu is a necessity to be a wrestling fan. And it's a shame that WW doesn't upload that version.

As for the Hornswoggle/Torito garbage, Vince Russo said it perfectly. On the Raw 2 weeks ago, El Torito had his tail ripped off, then in the next segment John Cena yelled "Payback is a bitch!". You can't appeal to kids and have Cena saying the "b-word" and you can't appeal to adults with the El Torito stuff (and I'll even add in the IWC, who hated both 2 things but loved the brawl at the end of the show while the casuals/kids may not have been that keen on that.) They need to find a way to appeal to everybody without turning off everybody at the same time.

Hey Stopspot, you think it's Kevin Dunn over VKM? Was just wondering how many NXT concepts will be added to Raw if Triple H takes over, but I highly doubt a "3 hour NXT" would work very well.

 

[Dolph'sZiggler]

I don't see how a 3 hour wrestling show can't hold your attention if booked properly, I'll go ahead and call BS. Especially when you have 45 minutes of commercials to move about. 3 hours isn't that long, most NFL games are shorter and many movies run nearly that long. WWE is just a really, really dull, repetitive product right now. Match quality is improving, but their is no depth on the show. We have no reason to care about more than 3-4 guys, so if you don't like the handpicked people who will be involved in storylines you really have to have a passion for the in ring side of things. There is absolutely no reason not to have some sort of angle tied to everything that leads to an in ring match. Anything less is just lazy and pointless, which is the calling card of the WWE product these days.

 

[CM Punk]

If there is usually a story behind a feud, we would have more reason to watch it. It's still given that our attention span won't last the entire three hours, but it can if they did utilize it properly. This isn't really about making RAW shorter although I would love that, but when they had 3 hour RAW specials, they could utilize all 3 hours properly which is why we would all get pumped over that special.

 

[Snowman1]

I don't see how a 3 hour wrestling show can't hold your attention if booked properly, I'll go ahead and call BS. Especially when you have 45 minutes of commercials to move about. 3 hours isn't that long, most NFL games are shorter and many movies run nearly that long. WWE is just a really, really dull, repetitive product right now. Match quality is improving, but their is no depth on the show. We have no reason to care about more than 3-4 guys, so if you don't like the handpicked people who will be involved in storylines you really have to have a passion for the in ring side of things. There is absolutely no reason not to have some sort of angle tied to everything that leads to an in ring match. Anything less is just lazy and pointless, which is the calling card of the WWE product these days.

To go with the NFL comparison, we look forward to those all week and that helps us get through, so you've got a point that if WWE regains it's Attitude Era-style excitement it could help more than I think it would. Then again the NFL is off for so much of the year that you have an "enjoy it while it's here" mentality to go with the long break. And a long movie is a special occasion while Raw is every week.

Obviously the rest of that is true, we've bitched about it enough lol. While storylines would help, I wonder why WWE is the only promotion where being a midcarder is such a bad thing. You never feel like Matt Taven or Colin Cassady or Manik are so irrelevant because they're not in the main-event...

 

[Dolph'sZiggler]

To go with the NFL comparison, we look forward to those all week and that helps us get through, so you've got a point that if WWE regains it's Attitude Era-style excitement it could help more than I think it would. Then again the NFL is off for so much of the year that you have an "enjoy it while it's here" mentality to go with the long break. And a long movie is a special occasion while Raw is every week.

Obviously the rest of that is true, we've bitched about it enough lol. While storylines would help, I wonder why WWE is the only promotion where being a midcarder is such a bad thing. You never feel like Matt Taven or Colin Cassady or Manik are so irrelevant because they're not in the main-event...

Because in most orgs the mid card is the preparation/proving ground to see who moves on to the ME. WWE just hand picks who will be rocketed to the ME leaving the mid card without any point or meaning and it is just a place to waste your career

 

[Just Kevin]

Get the creative team from the Attitude Era back... (I'm not saying to bring the AE back lol)... but in those days every belt meant something and there were so many meaningful feuds on every card level. The tag team division was awesome (the tag team division now has become complete shit again with only 4 or 5 teams) , the IC title was highly sought after... everyone had something to do... the talent today is fantastic and with the right writers there is no reason at all that the shows now can't be just as good as they were then. I really do believe it all comes down to creative. Plus we need a 4th belt... perhaps to bring back the European title, with the current influx of multinational wrestlers today, or to split the WHC and WWE titles back up again to allow for 2 stories there instead of just one.

HHH is head of creative, right? It all comes down to him.

 

[Snowman1]

Because in most orgs the mid card is the preparation/proving ground to see who moves on to the ME. WWE just hand picks who will be rocketed to the ME leaving the mid card without any point or meaning and it is just a place to waste your career

Looking at it again, TNA for example, a lot of the guys in the midcard were guys they pushed and just didn't follow up on (Storm, Anderson, Willow, etc) and still feel like they could be put into ME's at any time (or arguably are above EY and the main events), NXT has guys like Neville, Bo, and now Breeze work their way up the card just like you said...

Looking back throughout the last 5 years at the guys they pushed, 4 of them came from the midcard. Hardy, Miz, Punk, and Bryan, maybe Wyatt if you want to count him. Then again we know very few new guys get pushed.

Maybe there's hope for Cesaro then as he's similar to many of these guys (great worker, over like crazy, indy guy with a dedicated fanbase that'll help them trend on Twitter)

 

[The GOAT]

I have two ways of looking at this issue. On one hand, I don't really mind the 3-hour format. Although Bischoff himself stated that he regreted ever making Nitro a three-hour show since he felt it overexposed and burned out the talent, I don't feel it makes a whole lot of difference in the long run. When Raw was two hours a week and ran every week of the year except for Christmas, you were still watching over 200 hours of WWE television a year when you also count Smackdown on top of it. When you're already willing to watch THAT many hours of WWE television a year, is adding an extra hour on Monday nights really that much of a difference maker? Sure, you end up with a lot of filler, but you're gonna end up with filler on the show either way. Go back and watch every episode of Raw out of the years when it was only two hours, and write down all the matches that you end up seeing a dozen times or the number of segments that end up going nowhere in terms of developing any serious storylines. You'll still end up writing down quite a bit. When you've got that many hours of TV every year non-stop, it's practically unavoidable to end up with filler. (Then again, you could argue that as long as something serves a purpose on that week's show, it isn't necessarily filler even if it fails to impact the next week's show.)

On the other hand, I hate the three-hour format because three hours is just too long for a weekly show, especially since it's apparently hard enough for them to even keep it contained within three hours given that they usually run at least ten minutes in overtime. Plus, I really dislike the notion of a weekly show being as long as the monthly PPVs. And lastly, with Smackdown and one hour of Main Event (which is more or less considered the 'flagship show' of the Network) airing every week on top of Raw, an extra hour on Mondays isn't really necessary. Four hours of prime time television and one hour of Main Event on the Network should be more than enough time to develop any stories they want to tell.

 

[Cloud]

Its a pain as its so much to watch at times. Recently I zero out for the majority of RAW an only watch it out of habit and my gf wants to.

 

[ShaRpY HaRdY]

So like people who can't stand it, you just sit there and watch it without doing anything else? more power to you, I'm usually doing homework while it's on making it far more watchable I can only assume because what I'm doing at that coinciding time is far more boring.

 

[CM Punk]

^ Not sure who that is directed at, but back then I would be like, "RAW is on, better make sure I have no plans."

But now I hope there is something to do on Monday nights, because I'd much rather do anything else than watch RAW.