WWE opened Monday Night Raw this week with a chaotic and vicious parking lot attack. Royce Keys, who recently turned heel, and his new backup band OTM jumped Jimmy and Jey Uso and delivered a beatdown that left both brothers bloody and their car smashed up. The ambush was clearly meant to signal to the audience that the trio should be taken very seriously. Unfortunately, the segment didn’t exactly have the desired effect thanks to some heavy-handed censorship that was equal parts goofy and uncomfortable.
If you watch WWE programming on a regular basis, you may have noticed that either WWE, Netflix or some combination of the two have started going back and editing certain segments after Monday Night Raw airs. Sometimes if a joke is a tiny bit raunchy, they’ll just quietly delete it later and pretend like it never happened. Sometimes if a performer gets cut during a match and starts to bleed, they’ll add some blurring. It’s been annoying but this week went from annoying to infuriating.
Because the show was pre-taped rather than live, the edits that would normally happen later were implemented prior to the broadcast. That meant everyone watching the show was subjected to the censorship, and it was not exactly subtle. Check out this clip to get a sense of what I’m talking about…
This is very unsettling 😳 pic.twitter.com/GXgTNxLhY5September 1, 2026
That’s the short version of the full segment which ran for three minutes and included so many censored shots. At one point the camera zoomed in on a pool of blood on the ground, except we couldn’t see any of it because it was all just blurred out. As a viewer, it was disconcerting and also, impossible to take seriously. It was like the show was telling us to simultaneously be horrified by what we were seeing while simultaneously not trusting us to actually see it.
The creative team at WWE clearly wasn’t happy with how the segment came out either because Triple H tweeted an uncensored version from his personal account. Whoever is running the company’s YouTube channel also created their own version without most of the censorship that only contains a couple of blurred shots that were difficult to cut around. To the surprise of no one, both alternate versions feel a lot more intense and close to what everyone was actually going for.
I’m not going to sit here and say WWE needs to feature characters bleeding from head wounds every week. I watched wrestling as a kid, and I want the next generation of kids to be able to watch wrestling. We don’t need to go back to the Attitude Era (or even what we had when Raw launched on Netflix), but also, what happened last night cannot keep happening. It’s demeaning to viewers and embarrassing to try and defend as a wrestling fan. If WWE or Netflix isn’t comfortable showing something on television, then it shouldn’t be written that way. Censoring it out is way more awkward and embarrassing than not showing it at all.
I’m not employed by WWE, but if I were, I’d use this nonsense as an opportunity to meet with Netflix and get on the same page about all the censorship, not just the blood. I would say we want this to be entertainment for all ages, which means we’re not going to use certain words but every now and again, we are going to include a bawdy joke or a mid-level swear, and when that happens, we need you to leave it in. PG movies contain the occasional reference to sex and the occasional surprise swear word because real life isn’t censored.
I would say we’re going to stop intentionally using any blood, except for every once in a while as a surprise during a premium live event. Now and again, performers may accidentally bleed because a spot went wrong. When that happens, we’ll do our best to clean them up and not focus on it, but we need you to trust the audience and let them see it, exactly as happens with other sporting events when someone unexpectedly gets injured and starts bleeding.
Wrestling is meant to be entertainment for all ages. That means WWE should be thoughtful about its subject matter, but the current way it’s doing censorship is not working. Something needs to change because right now, it's really frustrating as a viewer.
