Goodbye PG Era: Raw goes to TV-14 rating starting next episode

With a TV-14 rating as it had in the past, WWE Raw will be open to some content it couldn’t show for more than a decade.

WWE Raw could be getting a little more raw as soon as this coming week.

Andrew Zarian, host of the Mat Men podcast and Wrestling Observer Live, tweeted the news that WWE’s long-running Monday night show will return to a TV-14 rating on July 18 after more than decade rated TV-PG.

The “PG Era” that Zarian refers to was WWE’s conscious effort to differentiate its programming from the Attitude Era that lasted from the late 1990s into the early 2000s. In July 2008, Raw received a TV-PG rating for the first time in nearly 11 years, and has been that way ever since. Figure Four Online notes that SmackDown has been rated TV-PG since its debut in 1999.

The change doesn’t necessarily mean WWE plans on taking Raw back to its less all-ages appropriate roots. But the TV-14 rating includes stronger cautions for parents on several fronts, including “strong language” as opposed to “infrequent coarse language,” along with “intense sexual content” versus “brief sexual content.”

There’s also a differences in the warning over violence: “intense” instead of “mild.” Vince McMahon suggested in the past that WWE wouldn’t do “blood and guts and things of that nature,” but the new Raw rating would allow the company to show blood and more explicit violence more freely.

It’s possible there won’t be many noticeable changes at all in the way Raw is presented on a weekly basis, and that the only differences will be the producers needing to be less wary about when Brock Lesnar is on the microphone — as was the case this past Monday when they edited out a mild curse from his promo. But it is quite literally the end of an era, and could make for an interesting point on the WWE timeline when looking back on the company’s history several decades from now.