Wednesday Night Wars

After the "Monday Night Wars", and the bankruptcy and subsequent acquisitions of both World Championship Wrestling (WCW) and Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW), WWE became the dominant national professional wrestling promotion in the United States. In 2008, WWE began to take a family-friendly approach in which all of its programming received a rating of TV-PG.[5] Impact Wrestling (then known as Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA)), which targets an adult audience, would move their flagship, weekly series, Impact!, to Monday nights on Spike TV opposite Raw from January to May 2010.[6] Impact would suffer from extremely low ratings and ultimately returned to their regular Thursday night timeslot on May 13, 2010.[7][8] The move itself would be panned by critics and viewers. In the tenth anniversary reprint of R.D. Reynolds and Bryan Alvarez's Death of WCW, the authors compared the move to the original Monday Night Wars, writing that TNA did not have the audience that WCW did, pointing out that WCW Saturday Night typically did better than WWE shows did in the weekend timeslots. Reynolds and Alvarez also wrote that TNA did not have the financial resources that WCW did.[9]

On February 23, 2010, WWE launched a new weekly show, WWE NXT, on Syfy.[10] The series originally paired up wrestlers from WWE's developmental territory, Florida Championship Wrestling (FCW), (dubbed "Rookies") with wrestlers from the promotion's Raw and Smackdown brands (dubbed "Pros") in a competition that saw the rookies being mentored by the pros as they develop their characters and performance skills in front of a live audience.

In 2012, NXT was revamped to focus exclusively on its developmental talent, with FCW being relaunched under the NXT brand.[11][12][13] In the years since the revamp, NXT would garner critical acclaim for its more grounded storylines and sports-based presentation compared to WWE's "main roster" programming [14][15][16], with fans and pundits eventually viewing the brand as its own distinct entity and its TakeOver specials to be superior in quality to WWE's monthly pay-per-views.[17][18][19]

On January 10, 2018, Cody and The Young Bucks, members of the stable known as The Elite, announced an independent event known as All In, which was scheduled for September 1 of that year at the Sears Centre in Hoffman Estates, Illinois.[20] Tickets for the event went on sale on May 13, and sold out in less than an hour.[21] The event was attended by 11,263 people, making it the first event in North America not held by WWE or WCW to sell 10,000 tickets or more since 1993. Four months after All In, Cody and the Young Bucks left Ring of Honor and announced plans to start a new wrestling promotion.[22][23] The promotion, which would become known as All Elite Wrestling (AEW), began operations on January 1, 2019, and announced that its first event, Double or Nothing, would be held on May 25 of that year.[24][25][26] In the months leading up to the event, AEW would sign many former ROH talent that left the promotion around the same time as The Elite, as well as wrestlers known from their time in New Japan Pro Wrestling, WWE, Impact wrestling, Major League Wrestling (MLW), and the independent wrestling scene. Such names include Adam Page, Chris Jericho, Kenny Omega, Joey Janela, Jon Moxley, Pac, Jake Hager, Sammy Guevara, SoCal Uncensored (Christopher Daniels, Scorpio Sky, and Frankie Kazarian), Allie and Awesome Kong.[27]

Ten days before Double or Nothing was held, AEW reached a deal with WarnerMedia to broadcast a weekly show on TNT, which would later become known as Dynamite.[28] On July 24, 2019, AEW announced that Dynamite would premiere on Wednesday, October 2 and would be broadcast live every week, marking the return of professional wrestling to a Warner-owned network after TNT broadcast the final episode of WCW Monday Nitro on March 26, 2001.[29] AEW has been described as "the first major promotion to compete financially with WWE since the closure of WCW".[28]

In August 2019, it was announced that NXT would be moving to USA Network, marking the show's first broadcast on the network since December 20, 2017, and expanding the program to a live, two-hour format.[30][31][32][33] Critics felt that the move was an attempt to counterprogram Dynamite, which would premiere two weeks later. NXT would premiere on USA on September 18, 2019 [33][34], however, due to scheduling overlap with the final episodes of original series Suits, only the first hour of NXT was broadcast on USA for its first two weeks while the second hour was shown on WWE Network.[35] In its first two weeks, NXT drew 1.179[36] and 1.006[37] million viewers respectively.

On October 2, 2019, Dynamite debuted on TNT, which averaged 1.409 million viewers.[38] NXT would make their full two-hour debut on USA Network on the same night, which averaged 891,000 viewers.[1] Dynamite would beat NXT in the ratings among both viewers in the 18–49 range and total viewers for its first seven episodes. NXT began to gain ground when WWE announced that the brand's wrestlers would compete at that year's Survivor Series, officially endorsing NXT as WWE's "third brand".[39] Competitors from the NXT brand would go on to win three of the five triple-threat matches at the pay-per-view, which saw NXT Women's Champion Shayna Baszler defeat Raw Women's Champion Becky Lynch and SmackDown Women's Champion Bayley in the main event.[40][41] These developments caused NXT to place first in the ratings for three out of the six remaining weeks of 2019, which culminated in a match where Rhea Ripley defeated Shayna Baszler to win the women's championship on the December 18 episode.[42]

The COVID-19 pandemic impacted professional wrestling in the United States. After WWE's Elimination Chamber event was held on March 8, several major sporting leagues around the world began to suspend operations in an attempt to curb the spread of the virus.[43] A meeting was held by Tampa officials on March 12 to determine the fate of WrestleMania 36; it was decided that the event would still proceed as planned, barring that the situation does not worsen in a week's time.[44] That same day, WWE announced that future episodes of their weekly television programs (beginning with the March 13 episode of WWE Smackdown) will be filmed at the WWE Performance Center without an audience until further notice, With NXT being filmed in the empty Full Sail Live Venue.[45] Meanwhile, AEW announced that it would relocate future episodes of Dynamite to Daily's Place in Jacksonville, with only essential personnel being allowed to attend.[46]