The marriage between TNA Wrestling and Destination America didn’t even last a year. Hell, it was just six months ago when TNA announced that Impact Wrestling would be moving to the Discovery-owned network at the beginning of 2015. Late on Wednesday night, the news broke that Destination America had canceled Impact Wrestling, which will take effect at the end of the third quarter.

Dave Meltzer from the Wrestling Observer has been tracking the saga between the two parties for weeks, and revealed that the decision was supposed to be kept as a secret until the network released its lineup for the 2015-16 season.

The decision was meant to be kept secret, very much like Spike kept secret publicly last year its decision to drop TNA for months after the decision was made and reported. It doesn’t serve the station or the promotion any good to publicly cancel the show this far in advance. The public acknowledgment was expected to come around the time the station listed its 2015-16 television season prime time lineup with the launch of up front advertising.

Meltzer also reveals some of the chaos behind the scenes with Destination America, with the cost of TNA outweighing the solid ratings being brought in by the programming.

The word internally was that while they considered the ratings good, the ratings were not good enough to justify the cost of the programming. The other problem was that so many regular station advertisers specifically did not want to advertise on the show.

And in another nod to just how dysfunctional this relationship is, Destination America affirmed their commitment to keeping Impact Wrestling on Friday nights throughout the summer…days before moving the show to Wednesdays.

It should be noted that when the word was sent out, it was stated specifically that TNA would remain on Friday nights, with original episodes, until that point, and informing people for the fall season plans for Friday nights. Just days later, they were moved to Wednesday.

What a mess. Is this the end for TNA? The company will be celebrating its 13th anniversary next month, but will spend that anniversary searching for its third TV partner in less than a year. That’s not an ideal situation for any company, let alone one that has experienced the struggles that TNA has recently. Will this be the end? We’ll see, but at 13 years, TNA has already outlasted the lifespans of both WCW and ECW. That’s pretty jarring to think about.

[Wrestling Observer]

About Joe Lucia

I hate your favorite team. I also sort of hate most of my favorite teams.

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