TV + Movies

WWE RAW Moving To Netflix Is Bad News For Longtime Wrestling Fans

Then, now, and forever. But mostly just now.

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Razor Ramon makes a statement on the first episode of RAW in 1993. Almost 32 years later to the day, John Cena makes an announcement on the premiere of RAW on Netflix.

WWE RAW entered into a new era on January 6th, 2025 when it premiered on Netflix. Unfortunately, for fans of the history of WWE’s flagship television series, it might also be entering a dark age.

RAW is an iconic brand in the world of professional wrestling. It set a new standard for televised pro-wrestling in the United States when it debuted in 1993, and, as tenured ringside commentator Michael Cole has been known to say ad nauseam, RAW is the longest running weekly episodic show in television history. But now much of that history is not available to watch.

If you go to Netflix right now, there’s a section titled “RAW Vault” where you can find a selection of episodes dating back to the very first RAW. However, out of 1650 episodes as of this writing, only 257 are on Netflix. That means about 84% of the RAW library is missing.

To add more perspective, 157 of the available episodes are from the past three years. It’s nice being able to watch every episode from 2022 until today, but that leaves only 100 shows to represent the entirety of the remainder of RAW’s 32 years on TV. There is even a 20-year gap with zero episodes from 2002 to 2021. For older WWE fans hoping to revisit some of their favorite moments, and for younger fans interested in RAW’s past, this is a dire situation.

The Undertaker vs Stone Cold Steve Austin on RAW, June 28, 1999.
Stone Cold Steve Austin challenging The Undertaker for the WWE Championship is one of the highest rated matches in RAW history, but you can’t watch this episode on Netflix. (image grabbed from a clipped version of the match on WWE’s YouTube channel)

The various rights for different markets throughout the world can get complicated, but in the United States nearly every episode of RAW was previously housed on the Peacock app (and on the standalone WWE Network prior to that). However, it is unclear if a complete RAW library will ever come to Netflix.

The only official statement about past episodes is an article on Netflix’s Tudum site which mentions rolling out “select WWE archival content” beginning in January 2025. “Select” sure doesn’t sound like “complete.”

This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened. When WWE NXT moved from the USA Network to The CW, the entire library of NXT weekly episodes was removed from Peacock. Now, the only archival episodes of NXT available to stream are those that originally aired on The CW. That means the library dates back no further than October 1st, 2024.

This is all incredibly frustrating for longtime fans of WWE. Back in 2014 when the WWE Network originally launched, it was like a dream come true. Finally, lifelong wrestling fans would have a single place to be able to watch new WWE programming while diving into deep archives of some of their most popular shows. Today that dream is fractured across various networks and streamers, each with their own ideas about content curation.

It’s rather ironic that RAW’s debut Netflix episode began with a presentation in which the voice of Mean Gene Okerland can be heard talking about “history in the making,” but WWE isn’t terribly concerned with letting us experience its history in a way that is anywhere near complete.