MAY 2019 WRESTLING TALK

[Niners Fan in CT]

Just now, Burgundy LaRue said:

You actively complained about Roman, Lacey and Lars getting segments/time.

I did but you said nobody wants to see 20 minute promos.  So I compromised and said that there probably isn't anything that most people are interested in. We don't know for sure which acts/segments are complete channel changers but we do know that none of it seems to be sticking.  Outside of Baron Corbin because I believe WO did research his segments and it showed they are really bad in viewership.  I also pointed out how these Lars Sullivan beat downs I feel like I can hear a pin drop.  So I guess I did say he's not over,  I still believe that. 

I didn't complain about Roman by the way.  I said they are dedicating a lot of time to this new authority stuff and I doubt anyone wants to see it,  I know I don't but if you like Shane/Elias/B-Team that's fine. 

[OSJ]

13 hours ago, SorceressKnight said:

Even beyond that, they may have to get rid of these super long matches more than anything and make more promos/backstage segments.

Again- people are starting to be aware "long" is not equal to "good", and a long match is only going to make someone a superstar if you have something like "holy shit, Seth Rollins/Kofi Kingston went an hour on free TV!"...and even that only works because that type of thing almost NEVER happens. (If someone was going an hour on Raw/Smackdown every month or so, it'd cease to mean anything.) 

It even openly hurts superstars' draw to go that far. For the most damning example: Ronda Rousey became a draw because she was steamrolling women in 30 seconds on UFC PPVs. If Rousey's suddenly taking 10 minutes to dispatch even the jobbiest jobbers in the women's division because "well, the match is LONG, so it must be good!", you're actively going against how people would want to see Rousey matches. Sometimes, the top stars SHOULD be dispatching the lower names quickly.

Lots of good stuff, excuse the snippage...

The most egregious problem can be summarized in the phrase "twenty-minute promos". Lost in the welter of McMahon-land nonsense is the concept that the ONLY reason for a promo of any length is to build interest in an upcoming match. Having done a good bit of public speaking wherein the idea was to get your point across succinctly we had a saying that "Anything over two minutes is flattering your ego, anything over five minutes is bullshit, and anything over ten minutes will be forgotten as soon as you sit down." Harsh, but there's a good bit of truth to it. Can you imagine a baseball game starting with having the two starting pitchers jabbering on for twenty minutes? Of course not. 

There's a lot of stuff that JCP/WCW gets demonized for and rightly so, but a lot of things they did right. Let's look at The Main Event show as an example. You knew that you were going to get two (more often three matches) in a one-hour show, or basically three segments of around twelve minutes a match. Your announcers kicked things off with a re-cap of what you were going to see and why and the opening segment was never more than five minutes including the necessary soundbites. We don't need wrestlers reciting Prospero's soliloquy from The Tempest; we need to know who is fighting who and why and that's it. 

Despite Kevin Dunn's babbling that RAW and SDL are not "wrestling" programs, I fully believe that the vast majority of viewers are tuning in because that's exactly what they want to watch, a wrestling program, with, ya know... wrestling as the focus. Hopefully AEW will correct a lot of the mistakes that WWE seems dedicated to repeating ad nauseum. Here's part of what I think makes for compelling television: 

1. Let us know what we're going to see and why. Five minutes at the top of a show is all the time that you need to catch everybody up including viewers who have never seen the product before. Here's a fun experiment, get a casual US fan to watch NJPW for the first time, by the end of the show they'll have a pretty solid idea of who everyone that participated is and what the issues are. 

2. To follow the thought from (1.): Everything should be about $$$, championships = $$$ (endorsement dollars, public appearance fees, yadda-yadda-yadda) yeah, I know that the "endorsement dollars" is bullshit, but it sounds good on TV and lends gravitas to the proceedings. You pretty much need your World title, your secondary title (I'm very fond of the TV title with the stipulation that it is defended every week or at least every month on TV with a fifteen or twenty-minute time limit. I loved the feature on WCW as you always new that you were going to get a decent-length of a match even if their twenty minutes was more like twelve in real time.

3. To follow (1.) and (2.) now you have reasons why the W/L column means something. Is anyone trying to sign a guy with .253 Batting Average as their spokesperson? I rather think not. So you have your top belt, a secondary title that should be used the way that the IC belt was back in the day, the holder of the IC belt was automatically the #1 contender. To go for the championship, you have to vacate your belt, opening the storyline to a scramble for the spot. A loss sends the challenger back down the ranks to rebuild.

4. If the W/L column has meaning, you enhance it by actively ranking your top-ten. I played top-level competitive darts for a lot of years, I didn't get to just waltz into a tournament and challenge Phil Taylor or Adrian Lewis (I'd have gotten my ass handed to me, but that's neither here nor there), if you're going to have one of your top-ten or champs in a squash match, formulate a REASON as to why this person is getting a shot. Winning a Battle Royale is always a good and believable scenario. 

5. Tag-teams need to mean something and not be hastily thrown-together pairings that mean nothing, (though there's a lot of mileage in milking the "guy suddenly needs a partner" trope. 

6. Backstage and in-ring interviews. Less is more. Refer to (1.), we know the motivation, we know the stakes, we don't need to hear any of that re-hashed by the wrestlers, that's the announcers' job. What we need to hear from the wrestlers is WHY we should be rooting for X as opposed to Z. None of that takes more than a minute or two to get across. 

Follow this general outline and you can easily get in three quality matches and several interview/promo segments to build up interest in next week's show. One of the big things that has been almost lost in these days of the WWE stranglehold on the business is the art of selling the next show. Again, we have to look back to the JCP/WCW days to see how this was done right. Dusty Rhodes gets lots of flack for his more egregious sins of pushing himself, holding down younger talent, cronyism, etc. but one thing that he did very, very well was to never lose sight of the primary goal once you had the audience seated: Get them to buy a ticket to next week's show on the way out. You need to keep that same focus in mind for a television show, we can laugh about phrases like "must-see tv", and yeah, they sound corny, but the idea is fundamentally sound. This isn't a daytime soap opera where you can tune in Monday and Friday and not feel like you missed anything. You need to stress that if you miss an episode, you are missing something IMPORTANT. 

Will AEW follow any/all of these guidelines? I suspect that they will, they've proven that they are a fairly sharp group of entrepreneurs with a great deal of experience learning what works and what doesn't. A national wrestling program that is actually focussed on wrestling first and foremost is something that I think will do surprisingly well versus RAW is Talk. What the braintrust at McMahonland has failed to understand is that without someone like a Rock, Austin, Punk, etc. you can't get away with long-winded scripted promos. The performers who are capable of carrying a lengthy talk-segment are very few, it's really foolish to try and pound people into a square-peg round-hole scenario like that. What's outlined above is do-able by even the least articulate of public speakers.

Edited May 7, 2019 by OSJ

[OSJ]

2 hours ago, Burgundy LaRue said:

 

One way to free up some space to cut out the 20-minute opening promos. They may have made sense 20 years ago during the Monday Night Wars, but they're albatrosses in 2019. Start the shows with a hot midcard match or backstage segment. It'll take half the time and leave 10 minutes for someone else. 

Much snippage...

Not to kick this poor horse into oblivion, but to piggyback this onto what I posted in response to SK's comments. Let's do some TV math based on my old favorite for this sort of discussion WCW's Main Event. In each hour you have three twelve-minute matches, obviously, you can shift time around in the case of an exceptional circumstance; but by and large that's your one-hour formula, allowing for adequate time for brief backstage segments, promos or interviews. In other words, just slightly over half the allocated TV time devoted to what the program is supposed to be about. And that's actually GOOD!

A two-hour show,l you have 72 minutes or so of wrestling, perhaps a bit more depending on commercials and so on, three hours, you can probably add forty-five minutes as most of your announcing talking points and promos/interviews/what-have-you are already out of thy way. So, you have a three-hour show of which two hours minimum is devoted to in-ring action. Anyone care to actually watch RAW tonight and see what we get for total in-ring action as opposed to nonsense? 

[John from Cincinnati]

21 minutes ago, OSJ said:

Can you imagine a baseball game starting with having the two starting pitchers jabbering on for twenty minutes? Of course not. 

Probably less time than is lost in an average game to dudes stepping outside the box after every pitch and adjusting their gloves.

[OSJ]

2 minutes ago, West Newbury Bad Boy said:

Probably less time than is lost in an average game to dudes stepping outside the box after every pitch and adjusting their gloves.

Don't even get me started...

[clintthecrippler]

I have harped on this before but I would kill for a televised wrestling program in 2019 that started exactly like Saturday Nights Main event, with four or five rapid-fire 30-second promos that are short and to the point and let me know exactly what Seth is going to burn down tonight.

And 100 percent agreed on the multiple two-to-three segment matches per show. I am not saying we need to go back to the Russo era where three minutes is the average bell time, but there are certain wrestlers where when you see them come out you know it's going 20 to 25 minutes including entrances. And that would make the monthly PPV/Network specials mean more because why should anyone really get THAT hyped to see Finn Balor vs Bobby Lashley in a 20-minute PPV match when each of them have been in matches of that length every week for the last month?

[LoneWolf&Subs]

I’m perfectly fine with promos. I’m just tired of wrestlers reciting unnatural dialogue back, and forth to each other all the time. They sort of brought it back, but for some reason needed wrestlers pretending they were using their phones to film the promos.

Edited May 7, 2019 by LoneWolf&Subs

[SorceressKnight]

1 hour ago, OSJ said:

1. Let us know what we're going to see and why. Five minutes at the top of a show is all the time that you need to catch everybody up including viewers who have never seen the product before. Here's a fun experiment, get a casual US fan to watch NJPW for the first time, by the end of the show they'll have a pretty solid idea of who everyone that participated is and what the issues are. 

2. To follow the thought from (1.): Everything should be about $$$, championships = $$$ (endorsement dollars, public appearance fees, yadda-yadda-yadda) yeah, I know that the "endorsement dollars" is bullshit, but it sounds good on TV and lends gravitas to the proceedings. You pretty much need your World title, your secondary title (I'm very fond of the TV title with the stipulation that it is defended every week or at least every month on TV with a fifteen or twenty-minute time limit. I loved the feature on WCW as you always new that you were going to get a decent-length of a match even if their twenty minutes was more like twelve in real time.

3. To follow (1.) and (2.) now you have reasons why the W/L column means something. Is anyone trying to sign a guy with .253 Batting Average as their spokesperson? I rather think not. So you have your top belt, a secondary title that should be used the way that the IC belt was back in the day, the holder of the IC belt was automatically the #1 contender. To go for the championship, you have to vacate your belt, opening the storyline to a scramble for the spot. A loss sends the challenger back down the ranks to rebuild.

4. If the W/L column has meaning, you enhance it by actively ranking your top-ten. I played top-level competitive darts for a lot of years, I didn't get to just waltz into a tournament and challenge Phil Taylor or Adrian Lewis (I'd have gotten my ass handed to me, but that's neither here nor there), if you're going to have one of your top-ten or champs in a squash match, formulate a REASON as to why this person is getting a shot. Winning a Battle Royale is always a good and believable scenario. 

5. Tag-teams need to mean something and not be hastily thrown-together pairings that mean nothing, (though there's a lot of mileage in milking the "guy suddenly needs a partner" trope. 

6. Backstage and in-ring interviews. Less is more. Refer to (1.), we know the motivation, we know the stakes, we don't need to hear any of that re-hashed by the wrestlers, that's the announcers' job. What we need to hear from the wrestlers is WHY we should be rooting for X as opposed to Z. None of that takes more than a minute or two to get across. 

Equal  snippage as well, so...

1. Honestly, this ties to another problem that WWE has as well: They don't follow through with the things they promise to let us see and why. Today on the Twitters, a stat came up: In the last year, WWE's social media had 237 announcements of what would happen on Raw and Smackdown, and only 95 of those things actually took place. Even if it'd be better to say it on the actual show, WWE's fanbase is social media-friendly, so in theory, WWE giving people the announcements of what would happen on social media could help things...IF WWE FOLLOWED THROUGH ON THOSE THINGS. As simple as "WWE promises you will see these things on Raw/Smackdown this week on their social media, and they GIVE YOU those things on social media" would do far more to get fans hyped up, and even be BETTER than your plan would be (you can hype the match up for up to a week in advance, and you don't need to waste too much time getting the fans on TV what they want. You can use that five extra minutes to show the Tweets leading up to the match, a short vignette to get people hyped.

2. The concept of everything being about money doesn't work, because ultimately, the fact we're still going with evil McMahons vs. pissed-off employees in 2019 is partially because money-wise, the toothpaste is out of the tube. The very nature of "I care about how much money I can make in this industry" is inherently a heel position to take, and "I don't care about the money, I just love wrestling. If these asshole McMahons don't like it, they can fire me, and I'd happily go wrestle for a hot dog and a handshake somewhere else just so I can wrestle for all you great fans" is inherently the face position to take. If you take the position that everything should be about the money, then by WWE's ruleset, you just turned every single superstar on the roster into bad guys (and no matter what the smark 'turn them heel, they'd be so much better!' argument is...ultimately, another problem WWE has is that the heroes' side of the coin has been weak for a long time, and casual fans- especially kids- want to cheer the heroes for doing heroic things, not cheer the villains for being really, really good at their job.) 

3. To follow these, this ties to another problem for why the W/L column needs to mean something without the money factor. You still need the titles, but you need to find a way to make the W/L column mean something...but that ties into 4...

4. Luckily to that, this is a benefit where fans are just too smart for their own good now, because it would be incredibly easy to play into the fans' real-life dissatisfaction ("My favorite wrestler isn't getting enough opportunities to wrestle! I know that they could be a megastar if the big mean WWE only gave them a CHANCE!") and turn this into a way to make wins and losses matter. A simple "if a wrestler has a win streak of a certain length of time (say, 5 match win streak for the US/IC/Tag/women's titles, 10 for the World Title), then they can demand a title shot" is really all you need to blow that out of the water. Now, every wrestler is desperate for a chance- ANY chance- to wrestle on the show. Even if it means wrestling in a match that has no real stakes and is just there to eat up some time, the stakes are there: Both these wrestlers are getting a chance to wrestle on the show, and if they win,  it will inherently get them closer to a title opportunity. Every match matters. Even this throwaway match is a chance for your favorite to get one step closer to the title...and if you're doing it, it may have to do something gutsy and have the "Open Challenge winner" win the title, in a "someone like a Cedric Alexander randomly shows up on Raw about once a month, but when he does, he happens to win, and no one notices- and finally a friend of Alexander's says "wait a second. You won five matches in a row! You can challenge for the US Title now!"...and Alexander does, and he wins...and suddenly he's gone from an afterthought to the champion....and in the process, you make sure that every level of match has to be watched, and people have to try and make sure no win streak is going beyond their notice.

5. I agree with this, but ultimately I think that the "tag teams need to mean something" thing needs to be a little lessened. Personally, I'm not asking for much in the "tag teams need to mean something": Just give me "the team has a name, the team has a tag team finisher, the team tries to dress alike" and I'll recognize them as a tag team. Just do that little and I'll recognize the two as a team.

6. This is a problem, because I'd say making it the announcers' job for most of this stuff is the problem. The wrestlers have to show why people should cheer them...and right now we see the different problem: If everybody in WWE is a really, really good wrestler, then no one is. You can't just use "you should cheer this person because they're a good wrestler" because even the worst wrestler on the WWE roster is still at least pretty good, and even "you should cheer them because they're an indie standout who finally made the biggest stage" doesn't matter since the majority of the roster had some good indie experience (or at least solid NXT experience, which is WWE's super-indie.) When that happens, you NEED more backstage and in-ring interviews, because now we have to find those things that make this person, in particular, special. Leaving that stuff to the announcers just leads to the problems of the announcers adding character traits to wrestlers and trying to make it their gimmick when it has nothing to do with their in-ring style or how they act as a performer outside the ring...and at the worst cases, can lead to "this wrestler was a heel last week because the announcers hated them, but this week they say they're good people so they're heroes now, I guess."

 

54 minutes ago, OSJ said:

Not to kick this poor horse into oblivion, but to piggyback this onto what I posted in response to SK's comments. Let's do some TV math based on my old favorite for this sort of discussion WCW's Main Event. In each hour you have three twelve-minute matches, obviously, you can shift time around in the case of an exceptional circumstance; but by and large that's your one-hour formula, allowing for adequate time for brief backstage segments, promos or interviews. In other words, just slightly over half the allocated TV time devoted to what the program is supposed to be about. And that's actually GOOD!

A two-hour show,l you have 72 minutes or so of wrestling, perhaps a bit more depending on commercials and so on, three hours, you can probably add forty-five minutes as most of your announcing talking points and promos/interviews/what-have-you are already out of thy way. So, you have a three-hour show of which two hours minimum is devoted to in-ring action. Anyone care to actually watch RAW tonight and see what we get for total in-ring action as opposed to nonsense? 

Tying into what'd effectively be 7: This is also the problem. Again, having a bunch of long matches doesn't work- because it ignores that "not all matches SHOULD be long." Again, it boils down to: If everything is special, then nothing is. If you say "okay, this match needs to go 12 minutes because it's a match and should go 12 minutes", then it's more static than anything else. If someone like Roman Reigns is going 12 minutes with guys like The B-Team, that's not going to help anyone. The B-Team won't look like more of a credible threat to Roman Reigns in the future...but Roman Reigns will look worse because he couldn't put these losers away early at best, and look like kind of a dick who was toying with these guys out of a perverse satisfaction in beating them up at worst.That's an example of "it's long for the sake of being long", and that's not a good thing. If someone's better served beating some jobbers into a gooey paste like Roman is, then he should be getting very short, quick squashes, and make people wait to see him face someone who can make Roman break a sweat. Throw in that, by and large, one of the common threads about people's dissatisfaction about the show is  "we want WWE to explore the room more. They have this great roster, we want to see them USE THEM", then more people should be used on the show as a result. 

[sabremike]

The idea they aren't getting more shit for doing a gay baiting angle with the Revival in the year 2019 is just amazing.

[Victator]

8 hours ago, Technico Support said:

Marginally talented blonde titty lady

My all time favorite, though brunette titty lady has her moments.

[Nice Guy Eddie]

2 hours ago, West Newbury Bad Boy said:

Probably less time than is lost in an average game to dudes stepping outside the box after every pitch and adjusting their gloves.

 

2 hours ago, OSJ said:

Don't even get me started...

@OSJ, I know you were a big Nomar Garciaparra fan.

Nomar was easily my least hated Red Sox player.

Edited May 7, 2019 by Nice Guy Eddie

[Niners Fan in CT]

I prefer female talent who can wrestle lady. 

[Victator]

7 minutes ago, Niners Fan in CT said:

I prefer female talent who can wrestle lady. 

I rather see her box.

[Dolfan in NYC]

I prefer close thread. 

[Nice Guy Eddie]

17 minutes ago, Victator said:

I rather see her box.

 

[odessasteps]

36 minutes ago, Dolfan in NYC said:

I prefer close thread. 

I'm still surprised it made it past May 1st. 

[Burgundy LaRue]

3 hours ago, Niners Fan in CT said:

I didn't complain about Roman by the way.

It wouldn't matter if you had. I was pointing out what I find to be a flaw in your overall argument. I mentioned the wrestlers you originally did.

Edited May 7, 2019 by Burgundy LaRue

[Victator]

46 minutes ago, Dolfan in NYC said:

I prefer close thread. 

Ooh nut flex

[Victator]

26 minutes ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

 

It was not til four years ago I figured out what that joke meant. 

[DreamBroken]

4 hours ago, L_W_P said:

I remember an idea I had when they announced Nakamura vs Cena taking place on SDL - It should have started just before the 2nd hour like every other TV semi main event. Maybe the announced main event is a women's or tag title match and they also have an announced segment for Miz TV.

Cena v Nak gets to the 25 min mark and Graves announces that Miz TV will be pushed back to next week.

They keep going and hit the 45 min mark. Now the 'main event' has to be pushed back a week as these 2 keep fighting. We hit the end of SDLs TV time and they are still going! "Everyone log into the WWE Network/App to see the conclusion of this insane match!" 
 

Would dig that, like they did with Cena/Michaels in 07 as they had announced Orton/Edge but ended up pushing it to the next week.

Another thing I'm surprised they never did more of was the 'tune to the Network' or Network exclusive stuff... like the one time they ran the really good Sheamus/Rusev US Title switch on the Network after RAW.

[Nice Guy Eddie]

1 hour ago, Victator said:

It was not til four years ago I figured out what that joke meant. 

but now you know...and knowing is half the battle

The best part came about a year and a half ago:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/gwyneth-paltrow-wins-halloween-seven-costume-1052787

Edited May 7, 2019 by Nice Guy Eddie

[Curt McGirt]

Eddie you bastard, I saw that yesterday on TV and had to press play and watch the whole damn thing again. Do me a favor and go to the Tuesday Song Stuck In Your Head thread

[Curt McGirt]

[Nice Guy Eddie]

6 minutes ago, Curt McGirt said:

Eddie you bastard, I saw that yesterday on TV and had to press play and watch the whole damn thing again. Do me a favor and go to the Tuesday Song Stuck In Your Head thread

Damn, that's harsh.

[Curt McGirt]

Captain January says CHEAP TRICK NOW, PRIVATE JOKER haha. Rikki tikki tack and take Vic with you