New Year’s Eve lands on a Friday night this year, but there will reportedly not be a live episode of Friday Night SmackDown for fans to watch. A live episode is something the company has done in the past, but not this year.
On the latest edition of Wrestling Observer Radio, Dave Meltzer noted that WWE will not be taping a live show on New Year’s Eve. Furthermore, the original show slated to take place in Charlotte has been canceled.
Fox reportedly decided not to run SmackDown this year so the focus can be on its New Year’s Eve programming.
However, the plans were then shifted to the live show happening on FS1. Due to that decision and knowing the ratings would be poor, WWE decided to not do a live show. Instead, it was noted that this will be a ‘year in review’ episode. The show will be looking back at 2021 on SmackDown.
It was mentioned that this decision was made by Vince McMahon, Nick Khan, and Kevin Dunn. When it comes to Christmas Eve, WWE will be running a normal episode of SmackDown but it will not be done live. Instead, WWE is set to tape two episodes of SmackDown on the 17th in Chicago.
The first episode will be live, which will air on that date. Once the show is over, WWE will tape another episode of the blue brand. That will be shown on Christmas Eve. This will provide fans with a normal episode and will act as the go-home episode for SmackDown ahead of the Day 1 PPV.
Even though there will be no live episode of SmackDown on New Year’s Eve, fans will be able to kick off 2022 with some WWE action. That is because the next PPV event is WWE’s Day 1, which will take place on New Year’s Day.
