A bunch of you learned about this earlier via Fergal's tweet and, oh, it is much dumber than you already thought. https://twitter.com/FergalBowers/status/1249980624745779200

WWE had been doing pre-recorded shows since the ability to do live, in arena, shows had ceased to be an option. This included Wrestlemania.

A form of entertainment that is extremely dependend on the crowd had its biggest event of the year in front of nobody.

This did lead to some oddities from the creative personnel involved, including a horror homage for the Undertaker's match but there were also wrestlers missing because of concerns about Covid-19.

This included the biggest star in the promotion, Roman Reigns, who has survived leukemia and...rather understandably...did not want to mess with that nonsense.

Such moves showed the fluidity of the situation, Reigns had to be replaced at short notice.

Yet they go live now?

Well that decision just happened to be made a couple of days after the XFL, the start-up American football league WWE chief shareholder (and effective total controller) Vince McMahon filed for bankruptcy.

McMahon has seen ratings plummet, the share price too, and generally speaking, things have been better.

That's where the switch back to going live comes in. The hoped for XFL revenues aren't going to materialise so protecting what's there matters more.

Which leads us to last week where two of the three network TV shows happen to be sold on being live, Raw (Mondays) and Smackdown (Fridays). The third show NXT airs Wednesdays, live normally, but it wasn't as big a factor.

Having just seen one thing go under...

McMahon has decided he needs to protect his extremely lucrative (hundreds of millions of dollars per annum) deals with Fox (Smackdown) and USA Network (Raw and NXT).

There's basically a worry that not being live could give the networks and out.

This didn't seem to be the case until the middle of recording last week, per multiple reports, where he changed his mind on pre-recording 5 weeks worth of shows and opted to move them all live.

Ah wrestling, it never ceases to be it's own insane world of wtf.