10 Wrestling Questions With Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly's Sam Duckworth
9. Wrestling As A Storytelling Medium
So most wrestling fans I know have that moment where they take a spell away from watching wrestling (or more specifically WWE). The one thing that got me back into wrestling - after a ten-year hiatus - was how powerful of a storytelling medium that wrestling can be. Would you agree with that?
"I think in some promotions, yes. I’ve got to a point with wrestling where [...] I watch pay-per-views and the odd bit on the [WWE] Network, but I just can’t watch Raw and SmackDown, I haven’t got five hours a week. I think NXT is amazing. It’s well done, it’s clever, I watch NXT every week.
In ROH, the storytelling’s more about sport, probably similar with New Japan… the PROGRESS storytelling I love! I love that Jimmy Havoc was about to get to the final at Wembley, [Paul] Robinson turns on him… it was brutal. When wrestling’s done like that, it’s great!
I think [when it’s] this whole ‘it’s a soap opera and sport’, the wrestling has to be amazing, and I think the controlling of storylines to try and make the wrestlers tell stories that are soap opera stories [...] means that I can’t watch a fourteen-minute WWE SmackDown match, ‘cause I know that it’s just not going to finish properly."