Baron Scicluna said:
ucacm said:
I feel like the E is really beginning to circle the drain. I know that they are about to get paid big time when they renew their TV contract, but they just can't keep doing this crap. They absolutely refuse to let any angle have time to breathe. Their desperate return to Cena may help for a bit longer, but he's eventually going to enter the pre-nWo WCW Hogan territory.
I just wish I could get inside the head of the "bury anyone that starts to get really over" mentality that seems to rule in WWE. It's freaking awful.
Eventually enter pre-NWO Hogan territory? I'd say he already has.
What they don't get is that when you get a really special storyline, it's OK to let it play out for more than 3 PPV cycles. I think part of it is that with the need for constant TV and multiple PPVs, we're used to needing storylines to move more quickly than the old days.
The days of Piper and Snuka battling for a year over a coconut wouldn't happen today because we'd be wanting Superfly to get his revenge on Smackdown, followed by Cowboy Bob vs. Snuka match on the next Raw with Piper interference, followed by the first PPV match in which Piper and Orton would screw him over. A year's worth of a storyline gets played out in a month.
In the days of Piper and Snuka, the feud only had to be featured on one segment a week. Since there was only an hour of TV each week, it was usually a quick promo. The TV matches in those days also tended to be sqaushes, which allowed the announcers to further the feud through their commentary. And, to cap it all, they were building to a PPV a few months down the line.
Now, there's about six hours of relevant TV a week. Those promo segments tend to run longer. Most of the TV matches of today, even the throwaway ones, could've been PPV-worthy 30 years ago in terms of matchups. And the PPVs come every month, whether we like it or not.
The fans have also changed. Their attention spans, by and large, aren't what they used to be. You drag a feud on longer than 3-4 months and it starts to feel stale. It's hard for the wrestlers themselves to keep the momentum going when you need several major waypoints and a well-defined ending. Fans want to see a story, but they expect it to be bigger and better than in years past, and they want it to escalate each time.
Fans being better educated about the business also forces them to speed things up. Every match these days is, it seems, watched with a critical eye. If they try something and it falls flat, it's ripped to shreds. If you skip a week in a feud, then come back to it, it's questioned as "killing momentum."
A lack of stables also hurts. Used to be, when a guy like Bobby Heenan had five wrestlers in his stable, they could have someone feud with the larger Heenan family and throw a few proxy matches in there with other stablemates. Now, so many guys are just on their own or in tag teams that that's harder to do. The Punk-Heyman feud is a throwback to that style, and some of the stuff with the Wyatts and the Shield might work like that, too.
Bottom line, the business has changed. Feuds are featured on TV more often, which necessarily forces them to escalate. Fans today have also been indoctrinated with the current PPV cycle. It's like watching a movie. You expect a certain flow to it, and when it tries a different storytelling style it's a risk that misses more often than it hits. If you're WWE, there's only a handful of guys you probably feel comfortable straying from that formula with.
