Credit: Dangerous Minds / WWE / YouTube Still

I’ve been a fan of professional wrestling since I was about 11 years old, which means that there are few things in this world that I hate more than professional wrestling… This might sound like a contradiction in terms, but it’s not, and any fan of competitive grappling knows exactly what I’m talking about.

Because pro-wrestling is an incredible form of performance art – yes, I just called it an art form because that’s precisely what it is, a way of telling stories through stage combat, improv, physical theatre and drag, but that’s not what makes up the biggest form of the medium, is it… The biggest wrestling company in the game, WWE, became a cultural juggernaut on the back of inane, car-crash TV filled with shock tactics, crass humour and bad-taste stunts that make Jackass look like Severance.

Those a little familiar with wrestling might think I’m referring to the so-called Attitude Era of the late 1990s, but actually, I’m not. I arrived a little after those “glory days” and settled my pre-teen self into the “Ruthless Aggression” era. One of the first storylines I watched (as an 11-year-old, I might add) was one where Kurt Angle became obsessively fixated on sexually assaulting Booker T’s wife, Sharmell, with the Olympic Hero referring to assaulting Sharmell, a Black woman, as “bestiality sex”. You starting to see why wrestling fans hate wrestling yet?

Yet that’s arguably not the most infamous storyline of that era. That came a few years later as arguably the swansong of the entire era. The moment that the company was forced to grow up due to circumstances that were as horrific in real life as they were in the storyline. The June 11th edition of Monday Night RAW ended with a long, somewhat unsettling scene of McMahon walking solemnly through a gauntlet of his assembled roster, before stepping into a waiting limousine, which then promptly exploded.

It’s not all that relevant to this story, but it’s always funny to remember that McMahon’s buddy Donald Trump called the WWE chairman after the episode aired to check if he was still alive – that man is now the president of the United States.

Grotesquely, the company decided to play this storyline straight, presenting the death of the fictional “Mr McMahon” character with the same tactics they’d used to present the heartbreakingly real passing of Eddie Guerrero just two years earlier. The word is that this was going to be the start of the next year’s worth of storylines, trying to figure out who killed Mr McMahon. Yet real-life tragedy would strike, leading to the abandonment of the storyline in the most horrific fashion possible.

Two weeks after his limo exploded, Vince McMahon appeared out of character to introduce the June 25th, 2007 episode of Raw, which was going to be a tribute to Chris Benoit, who had been found dead at his home the previous day – this tribute had been arranged and filmed long before the chilling events behind Benoit’s death had been made public, and because of that, the special has never been aired since and cannot be found on any streaming service hosting WWE programming.

The fallout from a storyline murder needing to be pulled because of an actual murder led to a company-wide updating of their programming. The storylines going forward couldn’t push the boundaries of bad taste the way they’d done before, and in order to maintain the commercial partnership and sponsors they already had, the company had to accept that their audience was no longer the young adults that it had been in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Instead, it was now a much younger audience of kids drawn to the larger-than-life characters and simple storytelling – after years of sticking to the original playbook and telling shocking stories that demanded attention, they needed to embrace the audience they had… The company’s programming was strictly PG from then on, a certification it maintains to this day.