Raw on Netflix: Paul Heyman Wants WWE “To Stick To Our Values” Despite Ratings Freedom

WWE Monday Night Raw is heading to Netflix. As announced this past January, the sports-entertainment giant has inked a five-year deal to air its flagship program on the biggest streaming service in the world. WWE Monday Night Raw officially exits cable television at the end of this year and will begin streaming on Netflix in January 2025. Buzz surrounding the change has been substantial, as executives from both WWE and Netflix have waxed poetic about the opportunities for growth throughout this relationship. One of those avenues of growth comes in the form of the product’s rating, as with WWE Monday Night Raw airing without advertisers, it will seemingly be free to operate as a TV-MA product.

Paul Heyman: “We Need to Stick to Our Values” on Netflix

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should seems to be the recurring sentiment across WWE.

Speaking to Bloomberg at the Power Players event, Paul Heyman admitted that he has “enjoyed” the TV-PG parameters on the WWE product due to the rating’s ability to reach a wider audience.

“I have always enjoyed the challenges of being PG and no offense to our predecessors and the people who came before us and the ratings that they revolved around, but to me it’s more challenging to be able to tell these stories,” Heyman said. “And then it also allows you a broader audience to connect to, which I just really feel like is always the goal. We want to reach as many people as possible and I think there’s a fine limit to when you can kind of cross that threshold to where you push people off of the product.

“I think there’s going to be a nice little range there that we can play with and push the envelope in certain senses,” Heyman continued. “But I think we need to stick to our values and kind of the morals that we’ve set in place and the culture that we have now.”

Heyman’s words echo those of WWE stars like CM Punk and Dominik Mysterio, both of which have encouraged WWE to reserve mature themes for when a storyline truly necessitates it.

“I feel like we’re pushing the envelope now, and I don’t want people to use Netflix as a crutch to say the f-word,” Punk said earlier this summer. “I feel that’s immediately where everybody goes, ‘We’re going to get to swear.’ No. If everybody swears, it doesn’t mean anything. If everybody is throwing the bird, it doesn’t mean anything. If every show, someone is bleeding and they fall off a building, it doesn’t mean anything.”

WWE Monday Night Raw premieres on Netflix in January 2025.