WWE SmackDown
American professional wrestling television program produced by WWE
WWE SmackDown, also known as Friday Night SmackDown or simply SmackDown, is an American professional wrestling television program produced by WWE. It currently airs live every Friday at 8 p.m. Eastern Time (ET) on USA Network in the United States, and in most international markets on Netflix. The show features characters from the SmackDown brand, to which WWE wrestlers are assigned to work and perform. SmackDown debuted on August 26, 1999 and is considered to be one of WWE's two flagship programs, along with Monday Night Raw.
Originally launched as a complementary second show to Raw, SmackDown became further distinct after the WWE brand split in 2002, representing the company's talent in the SmackDown brand roster. It has been taped in and broadcast from over hundreds of arenas and cities throughout twelve countries, mostly in the United States but also in Canada, France, Germany, Iraq, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Spain, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Australia. Prior to switching to its current live format, taped episodes premiered a few hours or up to a day earlier in certain countries outside the United States due to time differences.
SmackDown! began on the broadcast network UPN in 1999 and was initially broadcast on Thursday nights. The show moved to Friday nights on September 9, 2005, and began airing on The CW in September 2006, after the merger of UPN and the WB, before later moving to MyNetworkTV in October 2008.
“WWE SmackDown” enters the record as american professional wrestling television program produced by WWE. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what SmackDown, American and professional can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“WWE SmackDown” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, SmackDown, American and professional provides the most credible route into that argument.
Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q35622. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1999, 2002, 2005 and 2006.
Later fame can flatten the distinction between original context, subsequent adaptation and institutional collecting history. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “WWE SmackDown” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.