Fans crying out for more wrestling and fewer ads during weekly shows Raw and SmackDown will likely be getting a bit of respite, but probably not the way they envision.
Commercial breaks have long been cause for moaning, with one or two breaks getting slotted into any fight that exceeds the seven-minute mark. But, according to Wrestling Observer Radio, those are about to be a thing of the past.
It's really nothing to be excited about, however.
It's been reported that chairman Vince McMahon held a meeting last week to brief his subordinates on a new direction which includes the elimination of ad breaks during matches. From the offset, that does sound like great news, but we'll have to wait and see how this will be received by fans if it is indeed implemented.
If you ever wondered why there 2-out-of-3 falls have been happening on both Raw and SmackDown lately, it's because the company reckons that if there's a fall, they could go to a commercial and come back to the next fall so fans won't have missed anything of note by the time they return.
With this supposedly new system, however, matches won't be interrupted by ads. So instead of watching the start of a match, watching a commercial and then watching the rest of the match, you're simply going to see a shorter match. The match will be followed by a commercial, then the beginning of that same match, then the end. So it's really... kind of the same thing except that losers get to lose twice instead of once.
It's also been noticed that there are other changes which have taken place where WWE programming is concerned, for example, the dimming of the lights for the third hour of Raw.
This does not seem like that great of a fix, to be honest. But, then again, this hasn't been confirmed. Let's see how things go on Raw this Monday.