Professional wrestling is one of the most popular forms of entertainment on subscription television platforms around the world. This thesis deconstructed the texts of professional wrestling in order to investigate how the phenomenon functions as a commercial television artefact. To do this, the research project focused on a case study of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), and interrogated three specific aspects of the televised professional wrestling product. Firstly, the study identified and examined the functions that the different narrative segments in WWE programming play in the construction of the overall television narrative. Secondly, the pre-existing notion that social justice is the central and organising thematic principle for the narratives of televised wrestling was explored through the close textual analysis of a sample of WWE storylines from the past forty years. Thirdly, and finally, the project drew correlations between the televised texts of WWE and Justin Wyatt's (1994) model of High Concept Hollywood cinema. By means of the qualitative content analysis of over 280 hours of televised professional wrestling, the results of this study suggest three specific findings. Firstly, the project found that there are six underlying functions realised by the narrative segments of the televised wrestling text, and that furthermore, these functions and realisations combine to provide and yet resist the present in the wrestling text. Secondly, the study confirmed that the theme of social justice is the central organising principle of the continuing storylines of professional wrestling and provided a new model for understanding the operation of that theme. However, the study also suggested that social justice is increasingly not the central organising principle of the narratives of the individual matches. Finally, a positive correlation was drawn between the the television texts of WWE and the High Concept of Hollywood cinema suggested by Wyatt (1994). Accordingly this thesis suggests that WWE represents a high concept of professional wrestling which, through increased reaction time to market trends and deeper ancillary product saturation, travels even further than Wyatt's (1994) original notion.

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Speaking to a local radio station in the 1960s, with the glitz, glitter and glamour of televised professional wrestling at its height, one old, retired Cumbrian wrestler declared that ‘wrestling…was a game for the field not the stage'. This statement, condensed and potent as it is, could stand in for the questions this thesis asks and seeks to answer: why did wrestling develop as a professional, performed ‘sporting entertainment'? To answer this question, existing theories of social and sports history are combined with cultural studies methods and applied to Pierre Bourdieu's notion of fields. Chapters one and two surveys the birth of a fielded society and the growth of spectator and professional sport as part of a wider cultural field in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Considering many sports during this time had relationships with the theatre, circus and fairground, the seemingly logical expansion of professional sport was closer to that of professional wrestling. Sport, however, did not develop in this way. Chapter three explore the reasons for this and posits that the genesis of the sporting field, demonstrated by the growth of sporting bodies and the perpetuation of amateur ideal, dominated the field. Control of wrestling, however, for various reasons, was not gained in this manner. Chapter four examines the consequences of this when professional wrestling became a fully performed sport in the interwar years. Finally, chapter five assesses the relationship between the sporting field and television in the late twentieth century. Wrestling as a ‘sporting entertainment' is of interest precisely because it displays a ‘discarded possible' of how professional sport may have grown had it not been for the institutions and ideologies active within the field during the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century. It also demonstrates the often precarious nature of fields and concludes that sport's meanings, pleasure and values are not as consistent as are first assumed.