WWE Extreme Rules 2019: The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly 

The Bad #1 - The show was exhaustingly long

The Undertaker makes his long-awaited entrance at WWE Extreme Rules

We now live in the era of near constant professional wrestling content. In a weekend that saw WWE air EVOLVE's 10th-anniversary show on the WWE Network and AEW also air Fyter Fest, fans were exhausted heading into this event.

In an era where attention spans are at an all-time low, the last thing wrestling fans needed was an additional five hours of content to close an already long-winded weekend. Not to mention this all comes just before having to endure a three-hour RAW on Monday and a two-hour SmackDown this Tuesday.

WWE Extreme Rules suffered from a lack of brevity. The company would do better to return to its old format of three-hour pay-per-view shows with a one-hour Kickoff Show. Four total hours is plenty of time to tell a story when WWE already has an additional five hours of main roster television every week. More than that is simply overkill.

Extreme Rules' pace was off from the get-go. The show took forever just to get started. What is the point of a Kickoff Show other than to have a match or two that won't make the main card and to set up the main show by offering match by match analysis? Extreme Rules opened, as if there was no Kickoff Show, with a long-winded eerily whispered rehashing of what fans already saw on the Kickoff Show. This rehashing also took place (in a more limited fashion) before each and every match.

The opening of the pay-per-view was so exhaustingly long that it took 20 minutes just to see two wrestlers touch in the opening bout. Did WWE really need to take more than 8% of its time just for a re-hashing and entrances?

Such long pay-per-views do a disservice to the main event matches which are obviously the matches that most excite fans. In the era of the 5-hour pay-per-view, many fans are simply too tired to show interest in the matches that matter most. This is evidenced by increasingly quiet and disinterested live crowds.

WWE likely won't ever go back to its original format because the extra content (no matter how redundant) equals advertising revenue. It's just a shame that we all have to suffer for it.