10 Times WWE Employees Hated The Current Product
7. Stone Cold Steve Austin
'Stone Cold' Steve Austin is the Attitude Era personified. and one of the best sports entertainers to lace up a pair of wrestling boots and seize a live microphone. He has more than earned the right to give critiques that demands listeners.
When addressing the current product, Austin was critical of the structure of WWE programming, using a typical Raw as an example, he explained his grievances:-
“There’s just no interwoven storylines, which carries through the course of a Monday Night RAW where something, a seed is planted at the beginning […] and threaded through the entire show. It’s just match after match, segment, or in-ring segment, skit, whatever you want to call it, backstage promo.”
Austin calls out a wider problem of continuity in the current product. It extends to more than just the construction of a single weekly show. In 2020, examples of dropped storylines included SmackDown’s hacker, Liv Morgan’s love for Lana, and the lack of follow-up with Daniel Bryan’s “career-altering announcement”.
He discussed the modern product further: “They call it the reality era, but it’s anything but reality.” He advocated a return to “edgy as hell” storylines that push the envelope, concluding:
“And if you’re afraid to do that, if you’re afraid to try to grow, if you’re afraid to take a chance as a company, whether you’re publicly traded or not, then you’re failing to live up to your potential as a company.”
Austin taps into the dilemma that WWE is both a TV product and a business. It has the monopoly on Western professional wrestling and has remained profitable even at times when the product has been critically lambasted. Many wrestling fans follow WWE like they do their favourite sports team, staying with the company through highs and lows. Plus, they know if our interest is waning, they can pull out a legend for a three-month run to placate us.