Last week WWE SmackDown kicked off the new year in a big way as the show added a third hour. SmackDown will be a three hour show for the foreseeable future, but Triple H recently confirmed during an appearance on the Pat McAfee Show that SmackDown will eventually go back to a two hour format.
During a recent episode of Wrestling Observer Radio, Dave Meltzer discussed the temporary change and it was noted that USA Network wants to use SmackDown as a lead in for a new program that’s set to debut a few months from now.
“From my impression, it was always the idea (to have the show move to 3 hours temporarily) they just didn’t announce it at the time.
[…] I think the deal is that the USA Network has a programme they want to debut and they want to use SmackDown as the lead-in because SmackDown’s a fantastic lead-in to debut a new programme. The programme is debuting in a couple of months. The thing that’s interesting is losing that hour really hurts the USA Network weekly numbers, that’s probably why they picked it up in the first place.
[…] WWE never announced anything about any extra money so I don’t think they got it. It was just one of those things that USA didn’t have any ideas [for what comes after SmackDown] so maybe they paid them a bit extra for a couple of months because they had nothing better to put in the time slot. In a couple of months they’re gonna have a show to put in the timeslot and that’s when it goes back to two hours.”
H/T TJR Wrestling
