Why Did WWE Pulled Back on Moving to TV-14?

By Connor Casey

Reports started breaking back in July that WWE was looking to change its television programming rating from TV-PG back to TV-14, which would've officially ended the company's "TV-PG Era" and returned it to the same rating it had during the Attitude and Ruthless Aggression Eras. And while that change was even brought up on SmackDown, the jump never actually happened. It was then reported this week via Andrew Zarian and PWInsider that those plans had been scrapped. 

Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer shed some light on the situation on Wrestling Observer Radio this week. He pointed out that, since Zarian's initial report, Stephanie McMahon and Nick Khan are now running the company as Co-CEOs while Paul Levesque is in charge of WWE's Creative. The initial report dropped when Vince McMahon was still running the company

"That's not gonna happen now," Meltzer said. "Yeah, that was one of the new things. Andrew (Zarian) knows the whole story. Absolutely, there were memos and everything. It was planned. And I think that's the new regime and that could be Stephanie instead of Vince. Vince maybe was considering it. Stephanie's thing is let's not make Mattel unhappy and we don't need it (the TV-14 rating). You know what I mean? And they don't."

He went on to speculate, saying, "Well now, AEW is not going up (in the ratings, compared to Raw/SmackDown) and we are going up. So why do we need to fight them to do what they did that stopped working? If you look at the trajectory of everything, it's kind of like, yeah that's probably a decision that we shouldn't make right now. So they didn't, so I actually congratulate them for reversing course, based on analyzing what's happened in the last four months."

McMahon had previously teased the product becoming "edgier" back in July 2019. He said at the time, "We're gonna be a bit edgier, but still remain in the PG environment. We won't come anywhere close to going into another level. That will be something we do in terms of the direction of content, more controversy, and better storylines. At the same time, we're not going to go back to the Attitude Era. We're not gonna do blood and guts, such as being done on perhaps a new potential competitor. We're not going to go back to that gory crap that we graduated from. It's a more sophisticated product."

h/t WrestlingNews.co

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