USA Troubles

I’ve noticed that a lot of your recent emails have talked about USA needing WWE to deliver because their own ratings are in freefall.

Can you detail the situation over at USA for those of us that haven’t kept up with the news?

​They used to be the #1 cable channel by a lot when they had good shows on that were drawing ratings (don’t ask me what they were, I think Psych maybe?), and now they’re the #3 channel and if you took away WWE they would be completely out of the top ten. RAW is literally the only thing keeping them competitive with the other major cable networks at this point. ​And to make matters worse, they get somewhere between "zilch" and "fuck all" for ad revenue from wrestling, so it’s not like WWE is even making them lots of money. The hope is that WWE can prop up the overall average rating of the station enough that they can make money off the OTHER shitty shows that don’t draw ratings.

Basically it’s a very precarious situation for everyone involved, because the TV industry is notoriously fickle and someone higher up at NBC-U could wake up in the morning and fire the person programming USA and put on someone who hates wrestling instead, which is exactly what happened to WCW.