Column: The WWE Fix, by Jimmy Van

By Jimmy Van

The WWE Fix
 
I don’t profess to be some creative genius, and I certainly don’t profess to be capable of overseeing the creative process for an entertainment entity such as WWE.  But occasionally I’m asked what I would do if I was handed the keys to the WWE kingdom and I decided to share a few thoughts on the manner.

Completely Separate Rosters Per Brand  

WWE Raw, WWE Smackdown, and NXT should all have exclusive rosters to help make each weekly show appointment viewing.  Up until now whenever WWE has attempted a brand split, Vince McMahon has been quick to ignore it and feature star players on every show to try to pop a rating or at least stop the bleeding.  But it’s been proven that these short-term “band-aid” fixes are not beneficial long-term.  WWE needs to focus on a real brand split and train their audience that in order to see a certain talent, you have to tune into a certain show.  
 
Pick Your Players  

Another long-time problem with WWE has been their tendency to do 50/50 booking meaning one week, Wrestler A defeats Wrestler B, but then the very next week they have a rematch and Wrestler B defeats Wrestler A.  Triple H in interviews has referred to the 50/50 booking theory as a myth, but it is very much reality and I’m sure he knows it.  I believe that the reason Vince McMahon has gone with this style of booking for so long is that he isn’t willing to go all-in on a talent at the expense of another talent in case the guy he picked doesn’t get over.  But the problem with 50/50 booking is that you end up with a roster full of mid-carders and no true main event superstars.  And in 2019, that’s exactly where WWE is and where they have been.  With the possible exception of Brock Lesnar, there is nobody on the roster who feels like a bonafide superstar.  Not Roman Reigns, not Seth Rollins, not Kofi Kingston, nobody. WWE has to look at their roster from top to bottom and decide who they want to run with in three categories:

i) main eventers
ii) mid-card and up-and-comers with main event potential
iii) enhancement talent

Then, they have to protect that talent accordingly.  The “Tier 1” wrestlers win all of their matches against “Tier 2” and “Tier 3” performers.  Against “Tier 3” guy the wins are decisive and one-sided.  Against “Tier 2” guys the matches are more competitive but the top guys win.  Similarly, the “Tier 2” wrestlers always beat the “Tier 3” guys but the matches are competitive.  And to keep the “Tier 3” guys somewhat over, they’re occasionally given enhancement matches against local talent as well as promo opportunities.
 Fans root for winners.  Nobody wants to see a roster full of “win some, lose some” performers.  They want to see winners.  And WWE needs to rehabilitate almost its entire roster and cultivate winners again.  And then, you have to take calculated risks and decide who you’re going to protect and who you’re going to sacrifice, and then hope it works.
 
  Eliminate Scripted Promos  

This is an analogy you’ve probably heard before but it’s true: the best wrestlers get over by having their characters be an extension of their real-life selves with the volume turned up.  But how is a wrestler supposed to get their character and personality over when they’re expected to memorize a promo word-for-word that was written by somebody else?  You end up with a roster full of guys who talk the same and sound the same.  You also hamper their ability to improvise and think on the fly if something goes wrong.  Plus as we’ve seen on many occasions, you add pressure to these guys (and girls) by making them memorize pages of dialogue, sometimes on short-notice, in addition to having to perform physically in the ring.  There’s really nothing good or right about it.  And believe me I understand the theory – it’s live television.  You have to have structure, and timing, and you don’t want to risk coarse or controversial language by giving someone a live mic.  But that’s why the seven-second delay was created to begin with.    Go back to the basics.  Give the talent bullet points, and time cues.  Tell them to cut a promo in whatever style they want, but hit all of those points and do it in “X’ number of minutes.  There are so many charismatic, well-spoken performers on the WWE roster being stifled by the current process.  Give the talent the creative freedom and it won’t take long for the cream to rise to the top.
  

Listen to Your Audience and Pivot Accordingly  

How many times have we seen Triple H cut a promo in the ring with CM Punk or another rival in which he puts over the crowd, saying they dictate what the company does, or that they decide who the stars are?  Meanwhile, Vince McMahon has been notorious for years for *not* listening to his audience.  He decides who he wants to push and if the people don’t like it, too bad.  If anything it makes him want to push them harder in order to prove that he was right.  And so for years, we the WWE wrestling fanbase have watched and listened as the live crowd has rejected performer after performer that they know is the hand-picked corporate choice while simultaneously rooting for the people they want to support at any given time and in any given situation.  Sometimes if the response is noticeable enough week after week, McMahon has been forced to pivot as he’s done in recent years with the likes of Daniel Bryan, Becky Lynch and Kofi Kingston.  Most of the time he stubbornly stays the course and continues to push who he wants to, all the while saying publicly that WWE gives the audience what they want. Triple H invested a lot of time and a lot of money into certain NXT talents such as Bayley, or Shinsuke Nakamura.  He built them up to the point that they became rockstars to their NXT fanbase, with sold-out crowds singing their song and chanting their name.  These talents were then elevated to the main roster, were well received by the WWE fanbase upon their debut, and seemed destined for superstardom.  But then, likely because these talents didn’t seem to fit Vince McMahon’s vision of what a WWE superstar should look like or talk like, they were mishandled creatively, their weaknesses were exposed, they were beaten in the ring by the “real” stars, and they ended up on the bottom of the card having to work their way back up. Maybe, just maybe (okay, very likely) Vince McMahon’s vision of what makes a WWE superstar isn’t realistic in 2019.  Maybe, just maybe, the fans look at a certain 250-pound Bulgarian as a charismatic babyface and want to see him dance and peddle calendars and T-shirts.  Maybe they want to cheer for the Japanese guy, or maybe they don’t consider a female performer to be a star just because she’s a busty blonde.  Listen to your audience, and pivot accordingly.  It might not always work, and sometimes wrestlers aren’t ready for the spotlight even if the fans think they are.  But listen and try.  If it works out, great.  If it doesn’t, you gave it a shot, and your fanbase will know you heard them.

Get Back to Long-Term Booking  

We used to always hear about how Vince McMahon would decide on his Wrestlemania card as far as one year in advance, and then work backwards with respect to booking.  But now he doesn’t even seem to plan anything out a month in advance.  In fact, there have been plenty of TV days in which he was re-writing the script hours if not minutes before showtime.  What happened?  Where did this impatience come from?   Maybe it’s due to age which has made him more easily manipulated by others, and less decisive.  Whatever the reason, WWE has left a LOT of money on the table by being too impatient and hot-shotting too many matches instead of letting them grow and build over weeks and months. Hogan vs. Sting.  WCW waited over a year before pulling the trigger on that match at Starrcade 97.  Over a year!   The end result (terrible match finish aside) was the largest pay-per-view buyrate in company history.  Meanwhile you had Vince McMahon in 2005 after Batista split from Evolution, wanting to do the payoff match between Batista and Triple H the very next week on Raw until Hunter became adamant that they wait until Wrestlemania 21, which they did. Let a program marinade.  Let the story build.  Save the payoff match for weeks if not months later.  The results could be amazing both for the company, and for the talents involved.  But of course – listen to your audience.  And if a story isn’t working (*ahem* Lashley and Lana *ahem*), pivot accordingly.

Consolidate Titles & Book Lengthier Title Reigns  

I can still name every WWE Champion, Intercontinental Champion and Tag Team Champion from the mid-80s right into the late 90’s.  There were only three titles back then, and because there was no live weekly television or monthly PPVs, title reigns tended to last longer which in turn made the champions bigger stars, and made their eventual title loss a big deal.  But then for a variety of reasons including the introduction of new belts, the addition of more and more weekly television hours to fill and Vince McMahon’s impatience and tendency to hot-shot, the various titles started changing hands on a monthly if not weekly basis to the point that the history of the various belts is pretty cloudy in my mind now.  And today, it seems that a wrestler is made a champion not because he’s over with the crowd and deserves it, but because he’s *not* over with the crowd and they’re hoping the title will get him over.   The whole thing is backwards. WWE used to primarily run two live tours in the 80s with one typically headlined by the WWE Champion, and the other by the Intercontinental Champion.  Then with the creation of Smackdown came the decision to have one Raw live tour and one Smackdown live tour with titles on each brand and eventually we ended up with both a WWE Title and Universal Title; an IC and US Title; two sets of Tag Team Champions; two sets of Women’s Champions, a Cruiserweight Title and a Women’s Tag Team Title.  Not to mention the 24/7 Title.  It’s too much.  It has diluted the value of all of the titles and caused most fans to really not care if a particular match is for a championship or not. The WWE landscape has changed.  They’re in the television content business now, by their own admission.  And the live event business, once their bread and butter, is now break-even at best.  And so the need to have a bunch of titles featured across two live tours isn’t as important now as it was even five years ago. And so it’s time to consolidate some of these belts and make being a champion important again.  Merge the WWE and Universal Titles into one unified “world” champion.  Merge the United States and Intercontinental Titles into one “secondary” belt.  Merge the Women’s (singles) Titles and the men’s Tag Team Titles.  Then have the champions rotate between both brands taking on challengers from both Raw and Smackdown.  Whenever a champion loses, they go back to exclusivity on whatever brand they started with.  Make the titles mean something again. 

 Stop Hiring “Traditional” Entertainment Writers  

I have four divisions in my company, and 50 employees (Fightful is part of one division).   Whenever I recruit for a new hire, I naturally look for someone who has experience and knowledge matching whatever division I’m hiring them for.  For example I have a market research division.  What sense would it make for me to hire someone with a different type of research experience or knowledge than what we do just because I like the companies listed on their resume?  It would make zero sense.  But because in Vince McMahon’s mind WWE is “traditional” entertainment just like any television show you’d see on a network or any movie you’d see at the box office, he fell into the habit of hiring “traditional” entertainment writers.  He went after people who weren’t necessarily familiar with the inner-workings of a pro wrestling show but if their resumes had “The Simpsons” or “Saturday Night Live” on it, they were good to go.  He also for whatever reason decided to employ dozens of writers even though at WWE’s peak in the 90s the team consisted of no more than a handful of people at any given time.  This new strategy has resulted in a “rotating door” culture where guys are being hired and fired oftentimes within a few months.  I’m sure this all hasn’t benefited team morale, and it surely hasn’t benefited the product or wrestling fans either. WWE turns to ex-wrestlers to serve as match producers.  They need to start turning to more ex-wrestlers (or at least ex-wrestling people) for creative guidance.  There were so many wrestlers and backstage employees working for WWE, WCW and ECW by 2001 that I refuse to believe that there aren’t some brilliant creative minds out there who understand the business and how it works, and who could positively contribute to the WWE product.  You can still have some traditional television writers around to help craft storylines but to me, having a writer with no wrestling background script promos is lunacy and needs to change.  So does the head count.  WWE doesn’t need dozens of writers.  Cutting that number at least in half would make things much less confusing and much more efficient.
 
These are just a few creative ideas.  None of this stuff is rocket science, and maybe there are valid reasons why some if not all of this stuff won’t work.  But to me these things are no-brainers and I believe if WWE implemented these changes and stayed the course, the results would speak for themselves.