Remembering the most brutal moments WWE has still managed since going PG in 2008

[Jamie]

a fresh rundown of the most genuinely brutal moments WWE has produced since July 22, 2008, the date the company officially decreed all its programming would adhere to a PG rating after years of pressure from sponsors and special interest groups. Gone were the days of blood, cursing, and swimsuit contests, as the piece puts it, yet WWE somehow remained a family friendly business that still promoted fights where people punch each other in the head, and the list rounds up the handful of moments that genuinely flouted the PG rules with reckless abandon over the years since.

One entry covers NXT's 2018 trilogy between Johnny Gargano and Tommaso Ciampa, which produced three increasingly wild matches across that single year. Their unsanctioned brawl at TakeOver New Orleans saw Gargano powerbomb his former partner directly onto the exposed concrete floor, before the pair reconvened two months later at TakeOver Chicago II for a Chicago Street Fight that ended with Gargano taking a DDT onto the ring's bare wooden boards while Ciampa was still handcuffed. Their rivalry finally wrapped up at TakeOver Brooklyn 4 in a Last Man Standing match that, while it ran a bit too long and got silly in places, still produced its fair share of brutal moments.

Other entries pulled from around the wider web covering this same general topic point to Chris Jericho getting suplexed onto a bed of thumbtacks inside the Ambrose Asylum steel cage match against Dean Ambrose, Shane McMahon's infamous leap off the top of Hell in a Cell attempting to hit The Undertaker with a Coast to Coast style dive, and Randy Orton getting legitimately busted open by a string of vicious, almost MMA style punches and elbows from Brock Lesnar during their SummerSlam 2016 main event.

What all these moments share is that they would be considered fairly tame by the standards of the old Attitude Era, when blood, weapons, and genuinely dangerous stunts were essentially the weekly norm rather than the rare exception. In a sanitized PG world though, each of these specific moments still managed to blow people's minds precisely because they stood out so sharply against everything else surrounding them on the rest of the card

8 Most Brutal Hardcore Moments Of WWE's PG Erawhatculture.com

[Memory Jaguar]

The Gargano and Ciampa trilogy genuinely earns its spot on a list like this since it managed to feel authentically dangerous and hard hitting despite happening entirely within NXT's supposedly tighter PG mandate. Powerbombing someone directly onto exposed concrete is exactly the kind of moment that makes you wonder how strictly that PG rating actually gets enforced once the cameras start rolling for a big TakeOver main event

[QuantumLeap96]

Framing the entire PG era as somehow being both family friendly while still promoting fights where people punch each other in the head is a genuinely funny and honestly pretty accurate bit of self aware framing from the article itself. There has always been a real tension at the heart of that whole rating classification that rarely gets acknowledged this directly and openly in most wrestling coverage

[Enterprise]

Shane McMahon's entire post retirement career choosing to take absolutely insane bumps well into his forties and fifties remains one of the stranger and more fascinating running storylines in all of WWE history. A billionaire's son with genuinely nothing left to prove repeatedly risking real serious injury purely for the pop from a live crowd says something notably interesting about him as a performer specifically

[ECWAlfie47]

Jericho getting suplexed onto a bed of thumbtacks in that Ambrose Asylum match still holds up as one of the more genuinely wince inducing visuals from this entire supposedly toned down era. Small details like that prove WWE can absolutely still produce something that looks and feels dangerous within a PG framework when the story and stakes actually call for it specifically

[ShadowPilot]

Nice to see a listicle like this one actually acknowledging honestly that most of these moments would have barely registered at all during the Attitude Era's much higher baseline of routine violence and complete chaos. Context like that matters a lot for younger fans who never actually lived through that earlier period and might otherwise assume the entire PG era has simply been uniformly soft and watered down the whole way through

[Always_Shane35]

Randy Orton getting legitimately busted open by Brock Lesnar's shoot style striking at that 2016 SummerSlam main event blurred the line between scripted violence and something that looked uncomfortably real in a way that still generates genuine discussion nearly a decade later. That specific moment probably deserved its own dedicated deeper dive well beyond just a single brief bullet point on a wider list like this one