For years, WWE kept to the same general rule of thumb with their two main televised shows on cable: Raw was the “A” show on Monday nights and ran for a full three hours while SmackDown was the “B” show and ran for two hours, first on Tuesdays on USA Network and then later on Fridays with FOX. When SmackDown’s rights were repurchased by USA, it stayed as a two-hour show.
But the paradigm shifted a few months ago. In preparation for Raw’s move to Netflix on the first Monday of 2025, Raw shrunk from three hours to two in October, which was seen as a welcome change by most WWE fans, who felt a three-hour Raw had become cumbersome.
Interestingly enough, if WWE’s intention was to trim the fat with its offerings, they went in the opposite direction with SmackDown, which changed to a three-hour show starting in 2025.
Raw will mostly be kept under three hours on Netflix
So with SmackDown moving to three hours on USA, everyone was curious to see if Raw would remain a two-hour show on Netflix in an effort to be less “heavy” for that audience, or if Netflix would want to stretch out more ads and make their main, premium live offering at least equivalent to SmackDown.
Early reports suggested that Raw would have a whopping 3.5 hour runtime, rivaling that of Premium Live Events, and Netflix themselves wrote that Raw is a three-hour show that may actually run longer on its new home.
But so far, WWE haven’t gone over the three-hour mark with any of the initial offerings of Raw on Netflix. In fact, most episodes have been capped under three hours, somewhere in between two and three hours, normally the usual timespan of their weekly television shows.
Raw won’t have a set runtime on Netflix
That appears to be by design, with Triple H telling reporters that the official runtime of Raw on Netflix will be “flexible”, meaning there is actually no set runtime for the show anymore.
It makes sense for WWE to change the length of their programming based on what they have on offering on that given show, rather than trying to cram everything into two hours, which has been too little time to get everyone involved on the roster, or stretching an uneventful show into three plodding hours, something akin to the most torturous periods in Raw’s history.
The USA Network used to allow overruns for WWE programming, particularly on the road to WrestleMania, and with WrestleMania 41 up on the horizon, WWE can make use of that on Netflix by occasionally stretching what will generally be a 2.5-hour show into a 3.5-hour one if, say, they have a big match on tap for a WrestleMania season twist…or a surprise appearance from a legend like The Rock that night.
