WWE Evolve: Transforming the Landscape of Sports Entertainment

On March 5th, the WWE will debut its new television show: WWE Evolve. The new brand will air on Wednesday nights at 8:00 p.m. EST on Tubi and YouTube internationally. Evolve serves as a show that will feature developmental wrestlers from the WWE Performance Center and the new WWE ID Program competing to make it to the NXT brand with the hope to make it to either Raw or Smackdown. WWE Chief Content Officer Paul “Triple H” Levesque has described this show as being similar to the beginning of NXT in which nobody knew anybody and it was just a bunch of young wrestlers just trying to make it in the business. This is a new way for WWE to develop talent and for fans to watch new superstars being born.

Before it was a development brand, Evolve was a standalone brand on the indie scene from 2010 to 2020. Founded by former Ring of Honor booker Gabe Soplosky, Evolve had a great relationship with the WWE in which some wrestlers competed on the promotion. The WWE featured Evolve’s first live show on WWE Network in 2019, which featured future WWE stars Austin Theory and Josh Briggs. WWE purchased Evolve from Soplosky in July 2020 and hired him to revive the brand. Now, five years later, Evolve is back and is ready to shake up the journey to the WWE’s main roster.

Evolve will feature WWE ID prospects such as Kylie Rae, Zayda Steel, and Keanu Carver, as well as NXT Level Up standouts Layla Diggs and Brinley Reece. The promotion will also introduce wrestlers from college athletics striving to build their in-ring careers and develop their personas. Along with WWE LFG, Evolve is another way for the worldwide leader in sports entertainment to showcase feature talents and present them in ways beyond the NXT brand. It will be interesting to see the journey of how these wrestlers “evolve” into superstars in the WWE.