From: @EricBaba7: Apologies in advance for the length. I am admittedly a part time fan nowadays. I skim results now and rarely even DVR. If something major happens I'll find it on YouTube. I have also never felt less compelled to watch. A non-existent champion and (in my opinion) abundance of stale characters just don't give me the urge to want to watch. They always manage to pull me in with guys like Wyatt that are so compelling, then manage to botch it. I understand characters change and time moves on, but it seems like most never hit their full potential. When a part timer randomly showing up in Brooklyn is the best thing you've done in months I feel that's a problem. How do they fix it? How do they draw the part time fan in? I want to watch I really do. Is this a creative issue?
That was a long one over a series of tweets, but I felt like I should include it all because my guess is there are a lot of readers that feel the same way as this fan. It's a tough question to answer because there are a lot of things that can be better. I strongly believe that it isn't a talent issue. It's on creative. They're really not doing anything to compel viewers to watch. This angle with The Authority in power is the same "heels in control" angle we have seen endlessly for the majority of the last 20 years in WCW and WWE. I feel obliged to mention The Attitude Era because that's when WWE got out of a slump. The reason they did is because they did angles that felt fresh and they had the right mix of talent. No babyface is going to compel people to watch the way Steve Austin did and there's no young guy like The Rock coming up. Others like Triple H and Mankind were very good stars that were on the rise too. Then you had the three veterans in Bret Hart, Shawn Michaels & The Undertaker to bring credibility to the mix. Those were the guys that WWE built around. It worked because it was fresh. What we have today is a solid mix of veterans led by John Cena, Randy Orton and Brock Lesnar when he's actually around. The rising young stars have a lot of potential with Seth Rollins, Dean Ambrose, Roman Reigns and Bray Wyatt. The question is, can any of them do anything that's really fresh or that we haven't seen before? Probably not. That's why it's a creative issue. I don't know what angle they could do that would really be fresh, but that's where things need to change. They need to figure out that next big storyline or angle.
John wrote at WhatCulture from December 2013 to December 2015. It was fun, but it's over for now. Follow him on Twitter @johnreport. You can also send an email to mrjohncanton@gmail.com with any questions or comments as well.
