JANUARY 2021 Discussion of Wrestling

[SirSmUgly]

Holy shit, they DID cross streams! Wow, I am fucking stunned that RAW last week did fewer numbers than a Manchester derby in the United States.

 

[odessasteps]

Just now, Smelly McUgly said:

Holy shit, they DID cross streams! Wow, I am fucking stunned that RAW last week did fewer numbers than a Manchester derby in the United States.

 

And one was in prime time and the other was probably at 10 or 11 AM. 

[Super Ape]

2 hours ago, Yo-Yo's Roomie said:

This is me. I'm not giving up my Premier League.

I just don't get how these fuckers continue to make so much money.

Meanwhile, I’m already looking into switching to FiOS.

[John from Cincinnati]

Arn Anderson talks about his experience with COVID:

Quote

The last few weeks I found out a few things personally. I found out there is such a thing as a negative-positive test and a positive-negative test.  You can have several tests in a row that are all negative, which I did. I mean overkill, like every other day, because I got really, really sick a couple weeks ago for about 10 days. Thank God it was during the period we were off at AEW and I wasn’t exposed to anybody and quarantined in my house, but buddy, I’m just telling you, I know the symptoms vary, hugely, from person to person and age group, and let me tell you I got sick as hell. It scared me to death.

I was in the bed for probably a week. I couldn’t drink anything. I couldn’t eat anything. I was hallucinating. I was looking at my ceiling and I saw ice forming on the ceiling. So, I had one day there for a minute where I couldn’t catch my breath and it was a lot of things I never experienced in my life. It scared me to death. What I want to do is reiterate to everybody out there that guys, this thing is bad. It’s really bad and it varies from person to person.  We have not by a thousand percent turned the corner in this getting better. If anything, we are going into that peak season and we haven’t even started talking about the flu and all that.

I’m begging you, as a member of our family, tell everybody you know, wear the masks. Do the social distancing. Just take care of your health in general.  Try not to get a cold. Try not to get the flu. If you don’t have to go somewhere, don’t go. I know there’s a huge hangover in this country with all of our nurses and doctors and volunteers and police officers, you name it. Everybody that is out there on the front line, pulling 80, 90, 100 hour shifts so do something for those people. Do something nice for a stranger. Do something nice for a family member. If you can afford to make a house payment for them or a car payment, you know, take them grocery shopping. We are in a situation here that’s unprecedented. If we don’t look after each other as citizens, it’s not going to get done. I know this is strong. I don’t want anybody to get down.

This show is meant to just have some fun, but if we don’t stop and pause and realize we have to fix this ourselves, I don’t know, but I experienced it first hand. When I went back to work, just to button the story up, my tests that you always get with AEW before you can enter anywhere, you don’t even need to go to your hotel room. You fly in and go get a test. The one that I had this past Wednesday morning, all of a sudden I had the antibodies for having Covid, which meant that I had had it, but at no point did I test positive for it. So, what was going on in my bedroom for a week was absolutely Covid. It was brutal. It was hard to deal with. You go days without drinking water hardly because you can’t get it down. You go a week without food. It’s tough.  So, all I’m asking is let’s do some common sense things. Go the extra mile. For those of us that can do it, do something nice for a stranger. Do something nice for a family member. Do something nice for a friend and let’s get this thing knocked out.

https://wrestlingnews.co/aew-news/arn-anderson-says-he-had-covid-19-i-couldnt-eat-anything-i-was-hallucinating/ 

Edited January 26, 2021 by Andy in Kansas

[Peck]

Still not as bad as this:

[Eivion]

Sad to hear Arn caught it even with regular testing. At least he is fine good now.

[The Natural]

The 1992 Royal Rumble match and Ric Flair's post match promo with the WWF Championship, "With a tear in my eye" get universal acclaim and rightly so. This tends to miss out. Truth be told, I forgot about it till watching this back.

Edited January 26, 2021 by The Natural

[mattdangerously]

9 hours ago, Yo-Yo's Roomie said:

I just don't get how these fuckers continue to make so much money.

Their popularity is at historically low numbers, and yet they're still able to talk people who should know better into giving them astronomical amounts of money. It's astonishing. I ain't even mad, I'm impressed. 

This never would have happened under Jack Donaghy's watch, though.

[Ryan]

Not sure if it was mentioned at all, but Vince's only sibling, Rod McMahon, passed away last week. He had nothing to do with the business at any time. He was 77. I'm astonished Vince's mother's still around.

[paintedbynumbers]

Peacock would be so much better if they added the T-NBC shows like City Guys, Hang Time, California Dreams, One World.  And all the old video game cartoons they used to air Saturday Mornings such as Captain N,  Zelda,  and the one with Gretzky, Bo Jackson, and Michael Jordan.  Anyone remember those?

[RIPPA]

4 hours ago, mattdangerously said:

Their popularity is at historically low numbers, and yet they're still able to talk people who should know better into giving them astronomical amounts of money. It's astonishing. I ain't even mad, I'm impressed. 

See that's the thing - I think people WAY over estimate the intelligence of those in high positions of power. Yes there are some brilliant thinkers but there is also a grave yard of idiots.

Again - to cite the classic example - the stock plummeted because investors thought Vince actually blew up in the limo (including the former President of the United States)

The WWE will always be able to run their grif on those who think they are the smartest people in the room

[mattdangerously]

Yeah, but they're a television company. They know how ratings work.

[Technico Support]

4 hours ago, RIPPA said:

See that's the thing - I think people WAY over estimate the intelligence of those in high positions of power. Yes there are some brilliant thinkers but there is also a grave yard of idiots.

Again - to cite the classic example - the stock plummeted because investors thought Vince actually blew up in the limo (including the former President of the United States)

The WWE will always be able to run their grif on those who think they are the smartest people in the room

Exactly.  I feel like a lot of decision makers in a lot of industries, like TV, just go by "conventional wisdom" and "what are other execs doing?"  It's very much companies just aping whatever another company is having some success doing.  If everyone just buys the idea that "we need content and lots of it," then it makes sense that NBC would rent WWE Network's content at a loss.  Meltzer pointed out that it would have been cheaper to buy WWE outright, by the way.

Speaking of wrestling angles resulting in stock drops, stock also plummeted when Wall Street thought Trump had bought WWE when it was just an angle.  And please don't think too hard about the fact that we elected a president that Wall Street didn't even trust to run a wrestling promotion.

 

Edited January 26, 2021 by Technico Support

[JonnyLaw]

4 hours ago, mattdangerously said:

Their popularity is at historically low numbers, and yet they're still able to talk people who should know better into giving them astronomical amounts of money. It's astonishing. I ain't even mad, I'm impressed. 

This seems demonstrably false.

Regardless, this deal provides Peacock, a fledgling service, with a huge trove of existing content, a steady stream of new content(much of it live), and a large existing subscriber base.  It basically gives them extra time to establish themselves as a service and to create their own identity. 

Quality of product simply isn’t as important as quantifiable business metrics.  “They know how ratings work,” which means they know TV ratings are down across the board (although Smackdown has been up lately), yet Peacock was able to add content from one of cable’s most watched and longest running programs.  Compare it to SNL, it’s quality has been down for a long, long time, and yet having the SNL archives is a selling point.  The later seasons of the Office aren’t as good as the earlier ones, but “we’ve got the Office!” is the selling point.

[mattdangerously]

14 minutes ago, JonnyLaw said:

This seems demonstrably false.

I'm not saying that they've never been this unpopular, just that it's closer to the nadir than the zenith. 

[JonnyLaw]

20 minutes ago, mattdangerously said:

I'm not saying that they've never been this unpopular, just that it's closer to the nadir than the zenith. 

By what metric?

I assume you’re talking TV ratings, as they’ve had some of their lowest ratings ever, as people like to point out, but a) that doesn’t measure popularity, and b) TV ratings are down across the board.  That last point gets repeated a lot, but I don’t think people realize to what extent they’re down. In ‘97-‘98, when Raw ratings were at a pre-Attitude low, Seinfeld was the highest rated TV program with a rating of around 22.  In ‘19-‘20, the higher rated program was Sunday Night Football with around a 6 rating. WWE is never going to return to its Attitude Era ratings highs, because no one is getting those ratings anymore.  Instead, they have a relatively stable TV audience.

Saying they’re at a historical low also ignores things like mainstream awareness, crowd size (pre-pandemic), etc...

Edited January 26, 2021 by JonnyLaw

[mattdangerously]

How many people are actually watching? Raw is hovering around 2 million viewers a week. It's hard to argue that they're popular when no one is watching. 

[Boydy]

2 hours ago, paintedbynumbers said:

Peacock would be so much better if they added the T-NBC shows like City Guys, Hang Time, California Dreams, One World.  And all the old video game cartoons they used to air Saturday Mornings such as Captain N,  Zelda,  and the one with Gretzky, Bo Jackson, and Michael Jordan.  Anyone remember those?

When I was a kid I think I watched all of them. I remember California Dreams, City Guys and Hang Time definitely. They come just after Saved By The Bell ended and just before Boy Meets World come along in my tv viewing as a kid.

Happy memorie.

[JonnyLaw]

 

[YouHaveUntil5]

7 hours ago, mattdangerously said:

This never would have happened under Jack Donaghy's watch, though.

That depends, can they use Jerryvision on it?

[JonnyLaw]

33 minutes ago, mattdangerously said:

How many people are actually watching? Raw is hovering around 2 million viewers a week. It's hard to argue that they're popular when no one is watching. 

Disagreeing with their popularity being at an all time low isn’t the same as saying they’re popular.

You’re throwing out that 2 million number without any sort of context or background information due to confirmation bias.  Out of last week’s ten highest rated network programs, the one with the smallest audience was an episode of the voice with 7 million viewers.  On cable, the top ten program with the lowest viewers was a Maddow ep with a 2.3 rating and 3.4 million viewers. 

[mattdangerously]

You can throw out all the excuses you want, but if less people are watching a TV show than they were previously, then that's a pretty decent indication it's not as popular as it used to be.

[Zakk_Sabbath]

Just now, mattdangerously said:

You can throw out all the excuses you want, but if less people are watching a TV show than they were previously, then that's a pretty decent indication it's not as popular as it used to be.

I'm not like, rooting for the show to fail or anything, but unless I'm interpreting the numbers completely wrong (possible!) Raw is bleeding viewers way faster than the rate of other cable shows, so you really can't go by the whole "Well, no one watches TV anymore" thing

[JonnyLaw]

1 minute ago, mattdangerously said:

You can throw out all the excuses you want, but if less people are watching a TV show than they were previously, then that's a pretty decent indication it's not as popular as it used to be.

I don’t disagree, but it’s also not a pretty decent indication that it’s historically unpopular.

You do realize that the Peacock deal doesn’t even include the weekly live Raws, right? 

[John from Cincinnati]

7 hours ago, mattdangerously said:

This never would have happened under Jack Donaghy's watch, though.

I don't know. Sure, he's the man behind huge summer hits like Milf Island and he's the reason the microwave tray spins. But he's had his misses. Remember KouchTown?