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It occurred to me a couple of years ago that the backstage segments that are hangovers from the Attitude era could actually be really off-putting to people with common sense or taste. Why would Triple H and Stephanie McMahon talk about their evil plans in front of a camera that Daniel Bryan can watch later?
We as hardcore fans talk about it and joke about it as one of those wrestling things that either sort of bugs us or we don't notice -- but I often do wonder just how powerful something like that is to potential new fans. If you had never heard of wrestling when it was "cool" or when your older brother liked it, would you, in 2016, switch over and see these soliloquies and think "Oh, this makes no sense...I'm hooked"?
As hardcore fans, we let so much stupid stuff slide because we're so used to it. We love it at our core, so we give it a pass, or very often don't even notice it or question it. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is like "the fuck is this shit?" and turns off and wrestling never gets "cool" again. It doesn't make sense. The old slam against Kevin Dunn and Vince McMahon's approach was that they want to be too much like scripted television, but the thing is, they're not even good at that. There are redundant characters, redundant passages of dialogue, little continuity, and the acting is generally pretty bad. It's bad television. We praise the WWE for its production values, but that is for a wrestling company, and WWE chooses to not be a wrestling company, so it disqualifies itself on that laurel.
Just the other day I heard someone talking about a UFC fighter. I can't remember who it was, but they were talking about how much they hate them. They asked if I wanted to grab a beer to watch the fight. I agreed, even though I don't watch much UFC. I couldn't pass up the opportunity to have a social interaction with someone being WORKED!
"Brock Lesnar is such a dick." Yeah. He makes money by conveying that to you. The fights are real, don't get me wrong, but those personalities (even if they are based in truth) are work, work, working you.
I often think that wrestling must be done because everybody knows it is fake and is still butt-hurt about believing it for a second, even though they don't hate movies for the same reason; but then I see the people that are way into UFC (where the fights are, frankly, and this is just my opinion, routinely boring) and that there are people voting for Trump. They can be so fucking worked.
The WWE can control its own outcomes and hire guys who could, hypothetically, with the right training, work individual and exciting matches that are designed to extract more emotion and tell a more dramatic story than anything the UFC can put together on anything more than smart booking and good faith.
The worst thing about professional wrestling is that with some clever personalities, it could grab the world by the balls. You just need to tap in what people are willing to believe is real for a reasonable amount of time a week with the odd social investment when it comes to your town or there's a PPV on. It just needs to plant those memories in a new generation of fan that is always going to have that nostalgic twinge for that time they liked wrestling. That is what draws people back.
AJ Styles as WWE World Champion is the one thing that I feel properly works in the WWE, because I can completely believe he is the best professional wrestler in the world today. Everyone else has the same matches and the same promos. If they could get The Rock back to work with Styles, I bet you those television ratings will creep up. You know why? Because people can believe in The Rock. And when those ratings creep up, I'd like to hear those people who say "you have to understand that television is dying and the way people consume media is different" respond. Because, yes, there is truth to that, but it doesn't explain the proportional decline of WWE's live weekly viewership. That is a stale product.
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