10 Ways WWE Could Revive The Attitude Era (Even With A PG Rating)
1. Fire The F*cking Writers
Steve Austin wrote his own push, essentially, with the famous and fiery 3:16 King Of The Ring '96 speech. The Rick's illeism was his own invention. Triple H, with Shawn Michaels, used his own crude sense of humour to get over as 1997 drew to a close.
With a crowded writer's room decades later, few stand out from the crowd. The daftest thing stemming from that writer's room - dafter than Sparklecrotch, Kami, Empress of Nothing, Tater Tots, Sufferin' Succotash - is that there is no point to it all. If a performer is allowed a live mic presented only with bullet points, realistically, only one of three eventualities transpire:
1) Performer X knocks it out of the park, and gets over.
2) Performer X fails miserably, providing the audience with schadenfreude laughs and the performer themselves with a sobering lesson.
3) Performer X cuts the sort of forgettable promo that 20+ writers are paid to write on their behalf. What we have now, basically.
It's hard to argue that there is a Steve Austin or a Rock in our midst - but WWE will never find that once in a generation talent, if not one of that generation is given the opportunity. Fire the writers. Fire the writers. The number of stars created since the transition from bookers to writers (2002, roughly) is absurdly, depressingly, astonishingly low. Wrestlers are funnier and more engaging and more authentic on Twitter than they are on onscreen, too.
This is the way of not reviving the Attitude Era, but restoring the essence of pro wrestling itself.