8 Times WWE Tried (And Failed) To Recreate Their Past Success

Well, can’t talk about WWE trying and failing to catch lightning in a bottle twice without throwing of all these under a bus, can I?

WWE, ideally, is a soap opera about itself. As Max Landis stated in his video Wrestling Isn’t Wrestling: “It has more to do with Game of Thrones than UFC. Instead, it’s a TV show about a wrestling show.” Authority figures can be a perfect way to bridge together disparate characters and storylines and make the show feel like a connected whole rather than a collection of unrelated vignettes. Plus, the struggle for power (the central theme in basically all authority figure storylines) is something that can provide high stakes not just for the characters directly involved, but the company as a whole. It’s a shame then that most of the authority figure storylines WWE tries to pull off don’t work at all.

There are many reasons for this. For example, despite their admirable job at being unlikable, folks like Eric Bischoff, Vickie Guerrero, and Stephanie McMahon just aren’t as good at being outright supervillains like Vince was. Sometimes, the storyline just doesn’t make any sense, like when Teddy Long screwed the Undertaker out of the title for no reason (oh, but we’ll get back to that one), or the entire roster walking out on Triple H for unsafe working conditions because R-Truth and the Miz of all people are such a threat to everyone’s safety.

Sometimes, the performers are just hard to watch, like John Laurinaitis, Mike Adamle, or Mick Foley circa 2016. But perhaps the one aspect holding back almost all authority figure storylines since Steve Austin vs. Vince McMahon is this: they’re not believable, and moreover, they’re not relatable.

In the late 90s, your average fan could totally buy that sterile, corporate Vince McMahon would have a problem with foul-mouthed, beer-swilling Steve Austin as his company’s champion. Furthermore, your average fan could absolutely get behind someone who openly hated his boss and did terrible things to him physically and mentally. Lashing out against your boss and “the system” in the late 90s with films like Office Space, The Matrix, and Fight Club playing into the zeitgeist of the average bored, 9 to 5 salaryman, blue collar Joe, and disaffected teen, all of whom wanted their entertainment to violently lash out against the stale post-Cold War malaise of the late 20th century.

To sum up all that brainy mumbo jumbo: the average fan in 2017 doesn’t believe modern authority figures actually dislike their talent, and they’re not as into “fight your boss” narratives like they were in the late 90s. Hence why WWE’s continued reliance on those storylines usually doesn’t work. And when they’re trying to use such a narrative to artificially create a new star, it can outright backfire...