When Fox agreed to pay WWE $205 million per year for SmackDown, they were promised a sports-orientated product, and WWE seemed to be giving them what they wanted with Brock Lesnar and the debut of Cain Velasquez. Although it didn’t take long until they were replaced with the Firefly Fun House and King Corbin covered in dog food.
Now though, it seems WWE has gone too far with Jeff Hardy throwing urine in Sheamus’ face last Friday’s episode. Some people deemed the segment to be in questionable taste because it exploited Jeff Hardy’s real-life past drug issues by having Sheamus refuse to wrestle Hardy unless he passed a drug test, and Fox was not happy with it themselves, but for a different reason.
The segment would air during the initial airing of Smackdown on Fox’s East Coast feed but was edited off their West Coast feed as WWE hadn’t cleared the urine throwing with Fox beforehand. The act of throwing urine in someone’s face violated their standards and practices which govern moral, ethical, and legal implications of content they show.
WWE did a very similar segment back on the USA Network in 2006 on Raw with Shawn Michales throwing urine on Vince and Shane McMahon, but there is a big difference between what you can get away with on basic cable television than on a major US broadcast television network.
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