As I sat down to enjoy WWE Money in the Bank Presented by Cash App®, excitedly awaiting to see who was going to scale the Fireball Cinnamon Whiskey™ Ladder and maybe come crashing through the Snap Into a Slim Jim™ Folding Table, I decanted my Wheatley American Vodka®, glanced over at my package of emergency-use Dude Wipes® and couldn’t help but think WWE has changed over the past year or two; I just couldn’t quite put my finger on how. I bit into a Snickers®, because You’re Not You When You’re Hungry™, cracked open a Prime® and then it hit me: anybody else notice there are a lot of ads on WWE television these days?
If you’re over the age of like, 10, the WWE of today is very different from the WWE (or WWF) you grew up with. Half the company’s premium live events (that’s pay-per-views, for the fellow old-heads) take place overseas at oddball hours for Americans. Every square inch of the ring canvas is plastered in ads. One of the company’s largest financial windfalls every year comes from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. You can bet on professional wrestling. But this says less about WWE specifically than it does about American society as a whole, as WWE has always served as a cultural mirror of sorts for the United States.
Going back to the Hulkamania era of the 1980s, which many consider the beginning of the “modern era” of professional wrestling, the then-World Wrestling Federation has always co-opted American sentiment of the time, and in some cases helped create it. The Cold War America of the ’80s was dripping in American Exceptionalism, and so was the WWF, as the conquering Real American Hulk Hogan took on every foreign adversary under the sun, from the Iranian Iron Sheik to the Soviet Nikolai Volkoff. The “greed is good” ’80s was also all about excess, and the enormous, glistening, otherworldly bodies that occupied the top of the card in the WWF at the time were a testament to that. In Reagan’s America, where morning was always breaking and the Soviet Union was always the enemy, the WWF served up Hulk Hogan as the perfect patriotic avatar.
As Generation X matured into adulthood in the ’90s, a type of apathy and cynicism infected American culture – The Simpsons and Beavis and Butt-Head sardonically poked holes in the fairy tales of yesteryear, and so did the WWF. The American Hero moved aside for the Foul-Mouthed Redneck – we stopped being told to eat our vitamins and say our prayers, and were instead told to “suck it”. Displays of American excellence gave way to crash TV and ultraviolence in what is still remembered by many as the golden age of wrestling, the “Attitude Era”. America couldn’t stop talking about Bill Clinton and his extramarital affairs, shock jocks like Howard Stern and Opie & Anthony ruled the air waves, and it seemed like anything and everything was on the table.
Then, 9/11 happened and suddenly, American Exceptionalism was back on the menu. The Attitude Era’s lewd displays of violence and sex stayed, ramped up even, but now it was wrapped up in typical American values such as rugged individualism (or in WWE parlance, “Ruthless Aggression”) and outright jingoism. This was the era that started the Tribute to the Troops show, wherein WWE would literally travel to the Middle East to put on a show for our boys and girls in uniform. (In a prescient and deeply American move, Tribute to the Troops eventually became a show taped before SmackDown in whatever US city the company was in as a cost-cutting measure.)
As the George W. Bush years came to a close and the “Yes We Can” Obama era began, American culture started to pull back from the “anything goes” mentality of the late ’90s and early 2000s. This was the era of HD, the era where smartphones began to take off, and everything was accented by a sleek, shining sense of optimism. Socially, it was an era of questioning our prior assumptions and trying to move forward as a society. WWE too began to rein in the excesses of the Attitude and Ruthless Aggression eras – the “PG Era” was a stark reversion to the simple stories of the ’80s, albeit with less racism (but certainly not none!). This was an era of keeping sponsors happy – if the answer to the question “would Mattel be upset about having their logo next to this?” was ever yes, it didn’t happen.
In one of the most iconic and lampooned moments of this era, John Cena had the honor of telling the crowd at Extreme Rules 2011 that Osama Bin Laden had been killed. However, even just saying “kill” was considered too risqué for WWE at the time, so Cena proudly announced that Bin Laden had been “caught and compromised to a permanent end“. This sort of corporate jargon and ultra-sanitization of the product reflected not only WWE’s PG Era, but the culture of re-framing American pillars, and of contextualizing the world through a lens of “proper optics”.
History repeats itself, and just like the ’80s to the ’90s, the squeaky-clean storytelling of the PG Era soon gave way to a disillusionment and cynicism that some have deemed the “Reality Era”. In WWE, this era is marked by the Pipe Bomb and the Yes! Movement, analogues of real life events such as the Snowden whistleblowing and Occupy Wall Street. On the business side of things, WWE actually became a trailblazer in the world of streaming, launching its own WWE Network, as well as mastering social media. WWE’s product at the time is much maligned, but it’s hard to deny they saw where the puck was going in terms of content, which is now the be-all, end-all concept of American life.
WWE also shrewdly capitalized on shifting public attitude at the time – the #MeToo movement roughly coincided with WWE fans’ #GiveDivasAChance initiative, which gave way to the women’s division being given equal footing and promotion. This has led to the women’s division going from a titillating sideshow to arguably the strongest aspect of the promotion for years, resulting in the creation of mega stars like Rhea Ripley and Becky Lynch.
Which brings us to our present-day dystopia, where social attitudes are swinging back in the other direction and all bets are off – and you can get 10% off your first bet with code WWEISMORALLYBANKRUPT on DraftKings! – basketball courts, hockey rinks, and football fields are riddled with ads, both painted and augmented reality, The YouTube TV NBA Finals is presented by Chipotle with the Kia Halftime Show, absolutely everything can be bet on from your pocket, and corporations around the world are increasingly cozying up with authoritarian, violent governments to enter new markets. America has adopted a sort of nihilism, as if everyone has collectively decided, well, the bad guys won, the planet is doomed, we can’t afford anything – all that’s left to do is gamble (whether in the form of sports betting or retail investing) and hope for the best.
In a lot of ways, we’re regressing back to the “greed is good” ’80s, where financial windfall is the only thing that matters. Throughout the 2010s, crescendoing in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd, corporations offered at least the veneer of caring about the planet and the people inhabiting it – green pledges and social responsibility were corporate capital as good as gold. Those days are long over; the cynicism of previous eras has evolved into outright nihilism. Companies that used to tout its environmental initiatives and turn their social media avatars rainbow colored for Pride Month now refuse to take the stance that genocide is bad. Carbon neutrality goals were thrown out the window as soon as energy-inhaling AI models came into vogue. While corporations having social opinions felt patronizing and disingenuous, today’s complete disengagement somehow feels even more hollow.
WWE is no stranger to this, of course, entering into an agreement with the hostile Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 2018 to produce massive, WrestleMania-level shows in the country. Sure, every female wrestler has to dress like a Power Ranger to cover every square inch of their body, making a mockery of the idea that WWE values equality or social progress in order to kowtow to a violently regressive government. But have you considered how much money Shawn Michaels made to bastardize his career’s fairytale ending?
While WWE briefly leaned into more center-left ideas during the Obama years, the current product offers little more than escapist spectacle, a reflection of a culture numbed by outrage fatigue. The constant cries from pockets of people that they want “politics” removed from their “entertainment” have seemingly won (never mind how silly of a request that is) – while there are still excellent shows and movies being produced, it’s far more common to see vapid slop with nothing to say, too afraid to evoke any emotion besides contentment.
Enter 2025, when WWE moved its flagship show of over 30 years, Monday Night Raw, to Netflix to the tune of half a billion dollars per year. That’s a ton of money, but not content with that, the company took the opportunity to also plaster absolutely every square inch of the television presentation with advertisements and logos. If “the ring is sacred” to Gunther, he must be furious this year, because every headlock and pin attempt is on the backdrop of ads for ambulance-chasing injury lawyers and gin (a tag team made in heaven).
Perhaps the biggest perversion of the product came at this year’s WrestleMania 41, where multiple entrances were little more than thinly veiled product placements. Drew McIntyre came out dressed like Doom Guy to promote Doom: The Dark Ages, and in the most egregious example, the War Raiders came out dressed like Clash of Clans characters – and I’m convinced that was the reason they were even on the card at all. The SmackDown tag division was on fire at the time and had a bonafide five-star classic TLC match just a week later. The only reason I can imagine that division being snubbed while the comparatively weak Raw division made it to the Show of Shows is that Erik and Ivar kind of look like cartoon vikings from a mobile game that extracts millions of dollars from children and addicted adults, and that sucks.
Speaking of WrestleMania, The Rock made a big song and dance about announcing that next year’s installment would take place in New Orleans. However, mere months later, WWE rescinded that offer and gave it to Las Vegas for the second year in a row, an unprecedented move for multiple reasons. It’s yet another example of WWE completely shedding even the thinnest artifice of mutual respect and keeping your word in the name of higher profits.
Look, I’m under no delusions that WWE has ever been some magnanimous mom-and-pop company that put on a show out of love of the game. I know this is a ruthless corporation focused on profit and growth and always has been, ever since Vince Jr. took it over and drove everybody else out of business. The point is, it’s less a dark new chapter of WWE as it is a dark new chapter of American culture. WWE has always held a mirror up to society in its own way – if not to say something about it, to emulate it in an attempt to give the people what they want. This time, it’s comfortable saying that absolutely nothing matters besides extracting as much profit from existing inventory as mathematically possible. And in a society run by corporations and private equity wringing every last drop of shareholder growth out of their properties, WWE is not the exception, it’s the rule.
So why do I still watch? Is it inertia, keeping up with the ritual that has served as comfort food since I was six years old just because that’s what I’ve always done? I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of it. Maybe some of that “f— it, nothing matters anymore anyway” nihilism I was talking about earlier has seeped into my subconscious. No ethical consumption under capitalism, and all that. But even though the company’s politics and decisions often disgust me, its locker room is full of some great performers, many of whom share many of my ideals and are fun to root for. To put it another way, I’m watching for Sami Zayn, not Nick Khan.
Much like America itself, WWE is cyclical, so at a certain point, all that’s left to do is hunker down and wait for the storm to pass. A wise man who is no longer with us said it best: bad times don’t last, but bad guys do.
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