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“Ebbberrsoll, Have you gotten the oooovernights yet?”
– Randy Savage
WWE and NBC will renew their partnership this Saturday with the relaunch of Saturday Night’s Main Event.
In a different era, it would be hard to fathom that such an undertaking would not include Vince McMahon or Dick Ebersol, who launched the network franchise nearly forty years ago.
The series is being rebooted as part of WWE’s five-year deal with NBC Universal for the domestic cable rights to Friday Night SmackDown, calling for four yearly network specials.
Broadcast television has seen enormous sea changes since the last iteration of SNME in the mid-2000s, and it goes without saying how different the landscape is from 1985. But for WWE, it’s been a common practice to have its hand in as many mediums as possible, with broadcast holding onto reach while cable is precipitously dropping and streaming is still in the growth stage before reaching full maturity.
In 1985, it was a gift for the World Wrestling Federation to gain late-night NBC exposure but today, WWE holds a lot of the cards and has the potential to become a boon for NBC on a limited basis.
Network & Cable Competition on Saturday
FOX – College Basketball
ABC – NBA Basketball
CBS – The Neighborhood / Poppa’s House / NCIS
ESPN – Heisman Trophy Ceremony / College Football
TNT – AEW Collision
In recent years, we got a deeper understanding of how this concept of Saturday Night’s Main Event was birthed through Ebersol’s autobiography From Saturday Night to Sunday Night. In Ebersol’s recall, it was his agent Marty Klein who proposed Ebersol meet with Vince McMahon and was boosted by an endorsement of McMahon by David Letterman following an infamous sketch the two performed together.
Ebersol was hardly a pro wrestling fanatic and was skeptical, “I’d watched wrestling from time to time growing up. But it wasn’t until I met Vince that something important occurred to me: at the heart of the success of his operation was storytelling. Wrestling was, in effect, a live-action cartoon – with pretend heroes and villains, and rivalries and feuds, best delivered with a dose of humour and fun. Every one of those elements of the show was part of a story.”
Ebersol relayed that he and Vince & Linda McMahon shook hands on a “fifty-fifty split” and launched Saturday Night’s Main Event in May 1985. “Vince and I never signed a contract. I would send him 50 percent of the production fee from NBC that we got for the show and figured that was that. But nine months after our first batch of shows had aired, I got a surprise: the first of many checks in the mail at my house in Connecticut for half of the profits of everything else that came out of Saturday Night’s Main Event, like T-shirts and hats, and profits from international syndication. No business managers necessary; the McMahons had been totally true to their word”.
Weeks prior, the WWF received an unintended boost on the night before WrestleMania 1 when headliners Hulk Hogan & Mr. T were last-minute replacements to host Saturday Night Live on NBC. Initially, comedian Steve Landesberg was scheduled to host but there was an illness with his mother and limited Landesberg to only perform a stand-up set on the episode.
The NBC exposure was a big megaphone for the WWF on the eve of McMahon’s most ambitious undertaking and allowed millions to have face time with Hogan & Mr. T (and a taped promo delivered by opponents Roddy Piper & Cowboy Bob Orton).
While the WWF’s relationship with WTBS was coming to an end, the promotion now had relationships with NBC, MTV, CBS, and the USA Network to complement its syndicated programming as it increased its national footprint during this pivotal era.
The SNME debut on May 11 garnered an 8.8 rating for the four-match presentation, highlighted by Hulk Hogan defeating “Cowboy” Bob Orton by disqualification with Mr. T and Roddy Piper in opposite corners, and women’s star Wendi Richter beating Fabulous Moolah. For comparison, the 1984-85 season of SNL averaged a 7.5 rating in the same slot (the first SNME was programmed for sixty minutes).
From Ebersol: “The plan was clear: Vince would handle the wrestling, and I would handle the television…I also produced all the non-ring segments of the show: the interviews and out-of-ring interactions that set up the plotlines that viewers followed – often fanatically.”
It sparked a six-year relationship that spanned 29 Saturday night specials and branched into another Friday night series marketed as The Main Event and included the enormous February 1988 broadcast of Hulk Hogan vs. Andre the Giant that drew “in the neighborhood” of 33 million viewers.
The specials allowed millions of fans to watch the WWF product, see name versus name attractions (often at the tail of the pairings’ house show run) including champion Hulk Hogan wrestling on television in an era where you either paid for a ticket or a pay-per-view to watch him.
It became a great vehicle in the weeks before WrestleMania, to shoot your biggest angles and garner audiences that would seem impossible to reach today. One such example was on February 3, 1989, with Hulk Hogan & Randy Savage facing Akeem & Big Bossman and Elizabeth being knocked out and taken to the back by Hogan. The confrontation between Hogan & Savage in the trainer’s room was one of the most memorable segments in the show’s history – weeks before their WrestleMania 5 matchup – and posted an 11.6 rating and 21 million viewers for that airing.
The company roared for several years before a business downturn in the new decade and NBC would drop the series after the April 1991 airing, which was still garnering a 7.7 rating in its slot (SNL averaged a 7.5 that season).
The six-year-old Fox network picked up the series with two specials airing in February and October 1992 during a period when WWF’s image was ravaged by the ring boy scandal and steroid usage accusations, which placed the WWF under an intense microscope and led to Vince McMahon’s indictment the next year. The series quietly went away and was placed into storage for the next fourteen years.
By the mid-2000s, the now-WWE had undergone its second mainstream popularity boom, particularly throughout the 1998-2001 period where it was embedded into the country’s zeitgeist through crossover stars Steve Austin and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. In 1999, it marked the return to network television on the fledgling UPN through the launch of SmackDown in a two-hour format on the ultra-competitive Thursday night minefield.
The company’s business had softened in the absence of its two marquee stars – losing Austin to neck problems and Johnson to Hollywood. Successors such as Triple H, Bill Goldberg, Rob Van Dam, Chris Benoit, and Eddy Guerrero had not been able to fill the void while John Cena was still evolving into that role.
In early 2005, its broadcast partner Viacom (parent of Spike TV) publicly removed itself from negotiations for a renewal for WWE programming as they put their chips on UFC as its emerging franchise, thus, leaving WWE to scramble for a new domestic partner. It was during this time frame that the whispers of what would become the WWE Network were first heard with Vince McMahon wanting assurances of a guaranteed platform by launching his own years later.
The company received its lifeline through Bonnie Hammer of the USA Network with WWE Raw returning to its former home in October in a deal where WWE took a haircut by losing its cut of ad revenue but working in a clause to include two yearly specials on NBC.
Saturday Night’s Main Event was revived in March 2006 with a prime-time airing from 8 – 10 p.m. ET and loaded up with an appearance by Steve Austin, a Street Fight between Shawn Michaels and Shane McMahon, and John Cena & Triple H facing Kurt Angle, Rey Mysterio & Randy Orton.
Times changed greatly from the first era of SNME. The notion of names squaring off was novel in 1985 but common practice twenty years later where fans had a steady diet of these names and pairings between Raw and SmackDown and the monthly pay-per-views.
The return to NBC did a 3.11 rating and 5,150,000 viewers, which would be a home run this Saturday but considered a bomb eighteen years ago.
From the Wrestling Observer Newsletter:
The show led to NBC finishing dead last among the four networks that program on Saturdays, even though FOX and ABC aired repeat programming. To show just how bad a rating it was, out of 82 prime-time shows on the big four networks during the week, whether first run or reruns, it finished in 80th place, beating only The Loop on FOX on Thursday.
If there is a silver lining to this, it is that in the 18-49 age group, which is the secondary ratings desired, it was the best Saturday night number for NBC since the Olympics. The prior week, airing Dateline and Law & Order SVU repeats, NBC finished first in the ratings with a 4.7 overall, so there is no way to rationalize this number as a positive, or blame Saturday night when the number fell so far below what NBC usually does on Saturday night.
The March 2006 return was the high point of the return and numbers nosedived by generating a 2.6 rating in July 2006, a 2.2 in June 2007, a 2.5 in August 2007, and sunsetting the series after a 1.4 rating in August 2008.
NBC would fulfill its portion of the contract of airing WWE programming including Tribute to the Troops.
Once again, WWE is at an inflection point in 2024 as it experiences its greatest prosperity of the past two decades from a major shift in creative leadership, the rise of multiple crossover stars, and backed by the financial and marketing muscle of the merged TKO group.
This Saturday, WWE could create its footprint on a major broadcaster and compete with all programming that night while also gaining access to more viewers.
The notion of network exposure is relative and comes just months after WWE ended a five-year relationship with Fox where its stars were featured for two hours weekly. The shift from broadcast to cable has led to SmackDown losing its audience. In its final six weeks on Fox, the show averaged 2,096,000 viewers and 0.57 in the 18-49 demographic while the past six weeks on the USA Network have attracted an average of 1,435,000 viewers and a 0.42 in the demo.
Saturday, November 30 (Programming Insider)
ABC: Texas vs. Texas A&M (9,455,000 viewers, 2.44 in 18-49)
ESPN: Oklahoma vs. LSU (2,089,000, 0.54)
NBC: Washington vs. Oregon (2,572,000, 0.47)
FOX: Kansas State vs. Iowa State (2,009,000, 0.45)
CBS: Reindeer In Here (1,153,000, 0.18)
Saturday, November 23 (Programming Insider)
ABC: Alabama vs. Oklahoma (6,980,000, 1.54)
NBC: Army vs. Notre Dame (3,887,000 and 0.91 in 18-49)
ESPN: Texas A&M vs. Auburn (2,527,000, 0.69)
FOX: Iowa State vs. Utah (1,912,000, 0.44)
CBS: NWSL Soccer (968,000, 0.25)
Saturday, November 16 (Programming Insider)
ABC: Tennessee vs. Georgia (9,823,000, 2.39 in 18-49)
NBC: Oregon vs. Wisconsin (4,121,000, 0.84)
FX: UFC 309 Prelims (816,000, 0.36)
Fox: Cincinnati vs. Iowa State (1,002,000, 0.22)
ESPN: Arizona State vs. Kansas State (849,000, 0.21)
CBS: NCIS Origins (1,421,000, 0.13), 48 Hours (1,708,000, 0.14)
This weekend’s show looks exceptionally heavy on bell-to-bell action with five matches announced for the two-hour window including a heavily hyped championship match between top star Cody Rhodes and Kevin Owens.
Matches are well and good, and you can’t say any of the five don’t have some level of stakes and story behind them, but it has become increasingly clear that today’s modern WWE fan is greatly attracted to big stars involved in talking segments. Whether it be The Bloodline, CM Punk, Seth Rollins, Drew McIntyre, New Day, or Cody Rhodes, it’s the big promoted talking segments that are seen as “events” and it appears storyline progression segments are as coveted, if not more, than the payoff itself in the ring.
They are tapping into nostalgia through the usage of the classic “Obsession” theme and re-introducing Jesse Ventura to the broadcast booth for the duration of the show. It’s a nice balance as you don’t want to overly rely on nostalgia but rather, compliment the modern stars and product with callbacks and they seem to have struck that balance.
There will be four events on NBC per year with the second installment already confirmed for January 25 and allowing for a big push one week before the Royal Rumble. It is a great asset to have this broadcast window to promote the Rumble, streaming on Peacock and incentivizing NBC to push its premium live events as strongly as possible and place its promotional machine to ensure success.
The goal is to keep SNME as a fresh product that feels important rather than two additional hours of television. It is this expectation that led to AEW tuning into the inaugural Battle of the Belts in high volume but quickly evaporated to only a show consumed by its base audience and became disposable programming.
Like 1985, WWE finds itself married to multiple forms of distribution with a wide reach and NBC and Netflix represent two areas to create new fans and sell its biggest shows to.
While fortunes are high, its level of output in the year to come is daunting between all the hours of programming, which naturally can compromise quality in favor of quantity. The demand is high for WWE programming in its current form but as more and more is thrust upon the viewer to consume, it becomes an exceptionally difficult task to juggle.
Despite all the focus on the Netflix launch, next Tuesday’s ratings will be an insight into WWE’s current popularity and its ability to deliver on a major broadcaster four times per year.
