WWE officials are gearing up for a special episode of Monday Night Raw.

In January 2018, WWE will celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the launch of Monday Night Raw. According to PWinsider, the sports entertainment company will hold a special edition of the show on January 12th, 2018 and it will be held in Brooklyn, NY at the Barclays Center (close to the Manhattan Center, which hosted the first Raw).

Also, WWE will release the 25th Anniversary of Raw DVD set.The made its debut back January 11, 1993 on the USA Network and since then, it has been considered as the flagship program of WWE.

Raw moved from the USA Network to The Nashville Network in September 2000, which was rebranded to Spike TV in August 2003. The on October 3, 2005, Raw returned to the USA Network, where it remains today.

As of December 9, 2016, all episodes of the show are now available on demand on the WWE Network.

Raw has broadcast live from 208 different arenas in 171 cities and towns in eleven different nations (the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Afghanistan in 2005, Iraq in 2006 and 2007, South Africa, Germany, Japan, Italy,and Mexico).

If you recall, after the 1000th episode on July 23, 2012, Raw became a three-hour broadcast from two hours, a format that had previously been reserved for special episodes. This decision has been something that fans dislike due to the show being too long.

Back in 2009, it was reported that USA had regularly asked for three-hour episodes of Raw to boost TV ratings to help the cable channel in quarterly races against the likes of TNT, TBS, and ESPN.

McMahon has said before that he thinks the ideal length of a weekly wrestling show should be ninety minutes.

Former WWE creative writer Kevin Eck recently joined The Wade Keller Podcast for a wide-ranging conversation about his time with the company. During the interview, he revealed how McMahon developed the strategy of moving the main event from the end of the show due to the third hour pulling such bad ratings.

"What's happened recently is that I think---when you look at the ratings, you always see consistently the third hour drifts off, and you see a higher rating during the second hour, so I think we're seeing a shift to where on Raw a lot of times, what is considered the 'Main Event' is taking place at the end of the 9 o'clock hour and is drifting towards the 10 o'clock hour," Eck explained.

"There is some prestige to appear at the end of the show, but I don't think it's the same to when I worked there, or with SmackDown, since it's a 2 hour show. Vince [McMahon] has seen the ratings trend that people aren't sticking around, no matter what they put at segment 15 and 16 in the long stretch just wasn't doing so well, so why are you going to put your most important segment in the hour to where people are tuning out?"