House show

House shows are also often scripted to make the face wrestlers win most matches, largely to send the crowd home happy.

Until the 1990s, most televised professional wrestling programs were taped weeks in advance in small studios and featured primarily matches with lesser-known wrestlers while interviews revolved around feuds between upper level talent that were to be settled at an upcoming major show at the promotion's flagship venues.

Later on in the 1990s, the advent of weekly shows such as WWF's Monday Night Raw and WCW Monday Nitro, where competitive matches between upper level talent and storylines play out as they happen in front of a live audience, and with the increase in number of pay-per-view events held by promotions, angles are now typically developed during weekly shows, and resolved during the next pay-per-view (or, on occasion, a special episode of the series), rendering house shows to be mostly minor events with no long-term story significance.

For example, on May 19, 1996, the MSG "Curtain Call", which was also a rare example of a shoot, occurred at a house show taped at Madison Square Garden.

Edge similarly lost the aforementioned Intercontinental Championship back to Jarrett at Fully Loaded the next evening in Buffalo.

[10] A fictional house show can be used to explain a sudden vacation or change of a title caused due to backstage issues on television.

[15][16] In 2019, Shawn Michaels defended his one-off return at WWE's 2018 Crown Jewel pay-per-view in Saudi Arabia (reuniting D-Generation X to participate in a tag team match against The Brothers of Destruction) despite his retirement, describing the event as being a "glorified house show" that was not as important as WrestleMania or "coming back as the Heartbreak Kid".