Seth “Freakin” Rollins enters the Intuit Dome in Los Angeles on January 6th, 2025, for the Netflix debut of WWE Raw. WWE/Getty Images

Last year, two of the biggest media companies on the planet spent a fortune to bring live professional wrestling to their streaming platforms. Netflix dropped $5 billion to become the new home of WWE’s flagship program, Monday Night Raw, in the United States — and their entire universe of weekly shows and monthly “Premium Live Events” internationally — for the next decade. That’s actually a bargain for a company who measures success in hours, given that WWE produces between 7 and 10 hours of live programming each week, all year round, for an audience that’s remained steady even as the rest of linear television has struggled. (Over the next 10 years that $5 billion works out to roughly $2 million an hour, compared to the $200 million Netflix spent on the Dwayne Johnson-Gal Gadot-Ryan Rynolds movie Red Notice, runtime 118 minutes.) Even WWE’s much smaller competition All Elite Wrestling was able to secure a reported $555 million from Warner Bros. Discovery to expand their cable broadcast deal into the streaming world beginning this week. Wrestlers like Jon Moxley and Toni Storm will now rub elbows with John Oliver and Tony Soprano on Max.

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Wrestling’s appeal to broadcasting companies is obvious. It has a rabid, pre-sold audience which will tune in week after week for a live show that has the immediacy of competitive sports without the off-season. But the arrival of America’s favorite pretend sport to major streamers on a weekly basis presents an opportunity for uninitiated viewers to discover why wrestling has gotten its claws so deeply into the American psyche. Not only is wrestling more easily accessible than it’s been in decades, it’s also arguably better than it’s ever been, and conditions are set for it to reach a new level of mainstream obsession.

To an outsider, it can seem unfathomable that something as silly as pro wrestling could transfix viewers across the deeply divided American cultural landscape, from flag-waving midwesterners to working-class coastal immigrants to a shocking number of bearded, bespectacled Brooklyn hipster journalists like myself. The secret of wrestling’s appeal is that it is base, elemental entertainment built around simple values and the universal struggle to achieve........

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