Top 7 TV Shows On After Wrestling

A few Wednesdays ago, I was watching AEW Dynamite as one typically does. Once the show ended I was ready to change the channel to whatever else was on that night. Probably a hockey game, knowing myself and the Nashville Predators’ typical schedule. Then I saw something that compelled me to keep TBS on for a bit longer.

Stupid Pet Tricks!

This show had a few things going for it. First of all: pets. Who doesn’t love pets? There were also tricks, and who doesn’t love pets doing tricks? It also had Sarah Silverman as the host, who I hadn’t seen in quite awhile. Unfortunately, Stupid Pet Tricks following Dynamite seems to have been a one shot deal, and they’ve gone back to the usual Modern Family reruns. Nothing against Modern Family, it’s just that they don’t have pets doing tricks.

This all got me thinking about some of the great programming that has followed wrestling shows over the years. After a few weeks of craziness, I finally got the opportunity to narrow things down to seven. Here are the seven most magnificent TV shows that regularly aired after pro wrestling.

7. The New Adventures of Robin Hood

I remember absolutely nothing from this show except for the first episode. It was an interesting bit of marketing from TNT. Hulk Hogan & The Giant went on way too late in an episode of WCW Monday Nitro for a World Championship defense, so the announcers told us to stay tuned during The New Adventures of Robin Hood so we could see Hogan vs. Giant during the commercial breaks. Of course, it was stretching the bounds of reality to say that Hogan & Giant would have a match that lasted long enough to encompass the commercial breaks of a television show. I don’t think that even the biggest fans of Hogan & Giant’s workrate thought they would do a 60 minute Broadway. Talk about killing a town.

This is where I should go into more detail about this show, but Wishbone’s Robin Hood episode was probably better than anything this show could have presented. Now I’m hoping that at least one other person gets that reference.

6. La Femme Nikita

Nikita aired after Monday Night Raw during the show’s most watched time period, and in related news was also the highest-rated cable TV drama during the early part of its run. As a Reddit post reminded me, Nikita’s debut episode came right after Bret Hart shoved Vince McMahon down in the ring and went off about “frustrated” wasn’t the goshdarn word for it. Truly one of the great nights in WWF history.

La Femme Nikita got plenty of publicity during WWF programming, and the show even featured some wrestler involvement when Val Venis appeared on the show. No, Val didn’t show up in character, at least not on camera anyway. Nikita still gets some shoutouts to this day from WWE Superstars that remember seeing the show come on after Raw.

5. Silk Stalkings

Even though it was on right after Raw for the first years of its existence, I never saw a full episode of Silk Stalkings. See, I was a pre-teen that had a bedtime of 10 PM. I don’t know if parents do that sort of thing anymore, but my parents certainly did. I was just lucky that Raw didn’t have an over-run at that point.

From what I’ve read, Silk Stalkings probably wasn’t appropriate viewing for a nine year old anyway. My watching the show regularly wasn’t meant to be, but I still remember seeing the opening credits every week. The show looked interesting, and the music was incredibly catchy. It still sticks in my head thirty years after its prime.

4. Miz & Mrs.

During the 2010s, WWE made a habit of having their reality shows follow Raw or NXT on USA. In the case of Total Divas & Total Bella’s, they were typically reruns of shows that already aired on E!. Miz & Mrs. aired exclusively on USA, and for my money was more entertaining that either of the E! series.

I wasn’t expecting to like the show! Of course I’ve been a fan of Maryse since she debuted for reasons, but Miz always rubbed me the wrong way because he was annoying and from Cleveland. It turned out that Miz came off very well on the show and had some interesting characters around him. I mean, who didn’t love George Mizanin? Hopefully there will be another season with plenty of R-Truth content at some point. 

3. RollerJam

Who remembers the chaos that was Rollerjam? pic.twitter.com/nRbFRQFTwM

— GordiesElbow (@IceOffs) August 24, 2021

You could hear the disgust in ECW announcer Joey Styles’ voice every time he’d plug the show coming on after ECW on TNN. I never really understood the heat between ECW & RollerJam because as an early teenager they both appealed to me. I’d been following ECW the best I could through their silly syndicated TV deals while they were at their peak. I was so excited when ECW finally got a halfway decent TV deal even though ECW themselves didn’t seem too excited about it.

RollerJam had debuted a year before ECW made its TNN debut, and I was a fan! I was probably in their perfect demo as a teenager that didn’t have many friends and didn’t go out on Friday nights and liked seeing women in tight spandex. I apologize to anybody offended by such a thing, but I was a young, impressionable lad. Seeing Stacey Blitch, Lindsey Francis, Shay Brown & others on the rink filled a void that young, impressionable girls my age didn’t want to fill. (Porn was much more difficult to access back in the late 90s, at least for me. Kids these days don’t know what it’s like to have to go to the back of a video store with sunglasses & a trenchcoat on.)

RollerJam was a fun show until it lost the plot a couple of seasons in like most shows do. When Mark D’Amato & Sean Atkinson became brothers in storyline was when I lost interest, along with all the Prophet/Kenneth Loge nonsense.

2. Atlanta Braves Baseball

Those of you familiar with me know that I’m one of the more devout Cincinnati Reds fans out there. I’ve even spent a good chunk of my professional life at Great American Ballpark. No, the Braves have never ranked among my favorite teams…as great as those 1990s teams were and as great as their current teams promise to be with the corps of young stars they have signed up for years, I can’t really lay claim to any amount of love for the Atlanta Braves. The Reds still haven’t won a postseason series since the Braves swept them in the 1995 National League Championship Series. It still grinds my gears.

With that being said, I was always excited when I had the opportunity to watch some Braves baseball after WCW Saturday Night went off the air an hour early. Back in the days before MLB Network and the Extra Innings package, I didn’t have the chance to watch baseball at nearly every hour of the waking day. Reds games were on Channel 5 & Sportschannel intermittently, so I usually ended up seeing as much of if not more of the Braves on TBS & the Chicago Cubs on WGN than the Reds on their outlets. I especially loved the fact that the Cubs usually played weekday games at Wrigley Field, and I could get home from school in time for a couple of innings followed by Harry Caray singing “Take Me Out To The Ballgame”. Harry’s son Skip was on TBS’s Braves coverage, and even though he didn’t sing he was still solid behind the microphone.

Most wrestling fans hated it when WCW got cut short an hour, but it wasn’t a bad time for me.

Honorable Mention: Right After Wrestling/Aftermath

A postgame show for wrestling? Why not? Canada’s The Score, which aired WWE programming and later became Sportsnet 360, began airing Right After Wrestling in 2009. The show would eventually be known as Aftermath, and featured a number of folks that would later find themselves on WWE television. Renee Paquette & Jackie Redmond both made their wrestling media debuts here, and for that I am most certainly grateful.

1. The Ultimate Fighter

As somebody that followed UFC back in the day, I can’t oversell the importance of this show when it debuted. The first season that aired after Raw on Spike TV led to to the Ultimate Finale on April 9, 2005, which aired the fight beteeen Forrest Griffin & Stephan Bonnar that ended up becoming one of the greatest fights in MMA history. It established UFC as a force on cable television and pretty much led to everything that came afterward for the promotion. UFC 300 can pretty much owe its existence to The Ultimate Fighter Season 1 & Griffin vs. Bonnar.

The Ultimate Fighter also sped up the process of getting WWE Raw off of Spike TV, as Spike decided they didn’t need the high cost of airing Raw when they could get more out of UFC-related content. WWE went back to USA, which led to Spike making a deal with TNA. As one of TNA’s biggest supporters during the 2000s, that led to that company’s best time period. Everything worked out well for everybody involved at the time.

Thanks for reading! Hit me up at [email protected] or on the social media with thoughts, comments or suggestions. Until next time, true believers!