I’m not sure when the announcement will be officially made, but the decision has been made behind the scenes that Impact will be going to Mondays full-time.
The time of the change is at this point expected to be early March. We don’t yet know whether it’ll be from 8-10 p.m. or 9-11 p.m.
As things are planned right now, they will be taping every other week, doing Monday and Tuesdays with the Tuesday show being taped for the next Monday. Because of occasional odd number of weeks between PPVs, it’s possible there would be times they would either tape three shows or come back with a taping where they’d fly people in just for one live Monday. From a cost standpoint, it would be so much less expensive, and TNA is a company that still needs to watch its budget, in that situation to do three weeks at a time. This harkens back to the original days of Raw where they would do three weeks of tapings, with the first show live and the other shows taped. There was never a time period where live vs. tape made a difference in the ratings, but the 90s are very different than today.
The feeling is that the Thursday ratings are not as important as building a base for the Monday switch, because the whole nature of the ratings change at that point. From there, the shows will be micro-analyzed for minute-by-minute patterns and trying to time hot segments when Raw is in commercial breaks, figuring you can hit viewers switching away. TNA drew a bigger audience on Jan. 4 than it ever had for a Thursday show, but it was also the most publicized show in company history. But as a test, it did seem to show there was more potential for growth of the audience and product interest running on Monday, as well as increase the profile of the company with the idea they are going head-to-head with WWE.
My guess would be they would do what is currently planned with going live on alternate weeks for a little while. If the ratings for the taped shows were significantly down, that would be a sign they need to go to live every Monday. I would expect them to, on the taped show, maybe not show key segments with angles to the studio audience with the idea of keeping them getting out on spoilers if they believe it’ll hurt ratings. To me, I wouldn’t even worry about spoilers and such because in the big picture it doesn’t matter statistically, but when you’re in the wrestling Internet bubble, it’s a big thing.
As noted here from the start, those close to Hogan noted from the time he signed that part of the deal was a commitment from Spike to go live on Mondays, so this has been something at least heavily discussed and to a degree, in the works, since October.
If TNA goes 8-10 p.m., it wouldn’t shock me to see Raw go three hours. USA has wanted Raw to go to three hours, but I think Vince & Stephanie (and actually this goes for about 70% of the people I’ve spoken with who really know wrestling on both sides) have said that in a perfect world, the perfect length for a wrestling TV show is 90 minutes. Two hours drags in points and one hour today is too short. But television isn’t structured in a way where you can easily do 90 minute prime time shows, and certainly not on USA network, so two is clearly better than one. I think we’ve seen three is worse than two, but WWE is extremely protective about Monday nights and USA network probably isn’t familiar with whatever lessons there were when Nitro moved from two to three hours, which was a positive in the ratings early on but turned out quickly to be a negative.
