10 Ways To Make WWE Cool Again
3. Make People Care About The Midcarders
Vince Russo is given credit as one of the architects of the Attitude Era, and that's a pretty unfair simplification. Still, while most analysts realize that Russo was grossly overrated and that his contributions only worked when his creative input was heavily filtered, there was one way in which he added to the product - he made sure that every character, up and down the card, had an angle.
Granted, most of these angles were terrible, but that's no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Take, for example, American Alpha. Chad Gable and Jason Jordan are among the best tag teams in the world, and NXT fans knew it, but they're floundering in WWE because they have no defined motivation, no characterization, and no real relationships. As such, they get little reaction and they're featured sparingly. The result is a waste of talent.
By contrast, any number of late '90s midcarders could come out and get better pops than 90% of the active roster, just because fans have fond memories of them doing "cool" things. They seem like stars in retrospect, and it's not like WWE doesn't have enough TV time to do the same thing for their current roster.