Further News Regarding the Move of “Smackdown” Back to Thursdays

The latest edition of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter has provided further news regarding the move of “Smackdown” back to Thursdays. As previously reported, WWE may be moving it’s taped secondary program, “Smackdown,” back to its original day-of-air, Thursday.

“Smackdown” ran on Thursday nights from its inception until 2005. It was then moved to Fridays. The program also jumped around from network-to-network before landing on SyFy, where it has stayed since 2010.

Rumors of the show moving back to Thursday nights began when new “Smackdown” production trucks were photographed outside of a recent taping of the show, which featured a decal of the new WWE logo and promo for the show. The promo said that the show airs on Thursday nights at 8 p.m. ET, when currently it airs on Friday.

WWE would confirm that they are talking about moving the show, but that they would swiftly get to fixing the decals on their trucks because the move “has not been made official yet,” and someone in production must have “jumped the gun” when designing the decals that would wrap their trailers.

The interesting news that further pushes the idea that “Smackdown” is likely to be moved to Thursday nights soon, is that SyFy has announced that is hit show, “Haven,” would be moving to Thursday at 10 p.m. ET soon. “Haven” has been appearing on the network following “Smackdown” for some time at 10 p.m. ET on Fridays.

Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter makes this relatively obvious observation in regards to the move and why SyFy enjoys having “Haven” follow “Smackdown” in the network’s weekly line-up,

“SyFy liked the idea of having “Haven” follow Smackdown because Adam Copeland is one of the stars of “Haven,” and the feeling is that may keep some of the wrestling fans sticking with the next show and allow them to better monetize that wrestling audience.

If Smackdown moves to Thursday, it becomes an interesting issue in Canada. Sportsnet has a contract with the NHL for weekly Thursday night games during the season and the NHL is, by far, the most valuable property on the channel. At best WWE could have half the year on Thursday and half the year on another day, or just stick with Friday.”

Editor’s Note:
Thursdays are better. It’s not the weekend, kids aren’t usually watching sitcoms on various network channels. I would think ratings-wise moving to Thursday again would be a good move.