WWE Main Event is a professional wrestling television program produced by WWE that debuted October 3, 2012 on Ion Television, then went to live streaming on the WWE Network, and is now broadcast on Hulu (which receives new episodes first), Peacock, and the WWE Network. It features WWE wrestlers, and complements WWE's primary programs, Raw and SmackDown, with two exclusive matches and behind-the-scenes content per episode.
Unlike WWE Superstars, WWE Main Event originally featured main event and upper mid-card talent which includes John Cena, CM Punk, Sheamus, The Big Show, Alberto Del Rio, Kane, Daniel Bryan, Randy Orton, Dolph Ziggler, The Miz, and The Shield. However, Main Event has since become, for all intents and purposes, another version of WWE Superstars, both of which feature mid-to-low card wrestlers and Divas (although very recently the show now features mid-to-low card Superstars as well as an occasional match involving the cruiserweights as women's matches have increasingly been featured on RAW and Smackdown as of late).
In recent years, Main Event's prestige and importance within WWE has taken a nosedive. To illustrate how little of relevance Main Event is, WWE rarely even bothers uploading the show's highlights to their YouTube channel.
Most of the talent you'll see on Main Event are Demoted to Extra wrestlers who are on the tail end of their time in the WWE, before inevitably falling victim to Chuck Cunningham Syndrome. However, that's not always the case. Oftentimes, Main Event is used by the company as a means for testing and tweaking new gimmicks and characters before they arrive on Raw or Smackdown. Or, new talent callups from WWE NXT could show up here first in order to get some experience on lower-stakes programming before trying out one of the more important shows.
Tropes Associated with Main Event:
- Butt-Monkey: Due to its extremely low importance status within WWE, a superstar who loses a match on Main Event is often seen as this within the fandom.
- B Show
- Demoted to Extra: Main Event often features wrestling talent that once appeared prominently on either Raw or Smackdown but WWE decided was no longer worth showcasing on one of their more important shows.
- Gender-Equal Ensemble: Since 2018 or so, episodes of Main Event generally feature one men's match and one women's show, very rarely has there ever been a show with two men's matches and no women's match.
