WWE: Raw And Smackdown Suffering, Eric Bischoff Reveals Why
WWE Raw and Smackdown pretty much define the wrestling industry as a whole. While there is still an indy wrestling scene, there is no professional wrestling industry without Vince McMahon and company.
But lackluster ratings have become something of the norm in the WWE and the company’s WWE Network continues to underwhelm in spite of offering every pay-per-view events for free as part of the $9.99 per month subscription.
Why are the two flagship programs failing to deliver the results that professional wrestling needs?
Eric Bischoff has just summed it up perfectly in an interview with Alternative Nation.
“Whether it’s wrestling, or Sons of Anarchy, or Game of Thrones, whatever it is, it is first and foremost great story. It’s great characters that people really relate to, and it’s a great presentation. So does wrestling have to completely change everything? No, you don’t completely change anything.”
Bischoff feels that if wrestling is experiencing a downtime, it’s because the storytelling isn’t there, and that you really don’t have to reinvent the wheel to create another wrestling boom, such as what existed when he ran WCW Monday Nitro and went head-to-head with WWE every week.
“It wasn’t long ago when everybody [was] pounding what they thought was the final nail within the industry of scripted television,” Bischoff explained. “You couldn’t sell a sitcom… you couldn’t sell drama, not even an action series on scripted television, because reality was so popular, and that’s where the audience shifted. Everybody put their eggs in the reality basket, and guess what happened? Reality got saturated, and then all of a sudden great scripted dramas started to emerge, thanks to networks like HBO, Showtime, and shows like Breaking Bad.”
Bischoff calls it a formula “as old as Shakespeare.”
“Fifteen years ago when scripted television was on its last legs, and writers in Hollywood were looking for buildings to jump off of, nobody would have thought that that ever would have… happened. But what happened was out of necessity, and trying to carve out a niche and survive, somebody that was smart started creating really great story, with really compelling characters.”
The current problem with WWE — and this is why Raw and Smackdown are failing to do much more than a 2.0 in the ratings — is that the “somebody smart” Bischoff speaks of isn’t the somebody running the show.
Vince continues to come up with tired ideas, playing up the Cold War of the ’80s, suppressing organically popular talents like Cesaro and Bray Wyatt, and running every aspect of the program like a dictatorship complete with 28-page scripts that don’t allow guys to craft their own promos and characters anymore.
I would also add to what Bischoff has said by saying that the lack of competition has made McMahon too complacent, and that he would be better off giving other promotions some airtime on the WWE Network.
It’s just good business sense that it’s better to own 75 percent of a billion dollar industry than 100 percent of a $200 million industry. Currently, the WWE is the only game in town.
While it eventually beat WCW and “won” the Monday Night War of the 1990s, it cannibalized its own industry and ended up with a much smaller “award” than what it was earning week-to-week with a healthy rival.
But what do you think, readers? Do you agree that the WWE is out of ideas for compelling stories? Are there great characters not currently getting a push? How do you “fix” the WWE wrestling product?
