Jim Cornette Offers Vince McMahon Advice On Sagging WWE Ratings
James E. has some stern, sage words of advice for Vince McMahon.
Jim Cornette is never shy to share his opinion on a whole host of topics in the pro wrestling business, and the most recent episode of Corny and Brian Last's Drive Thru podcast saw the legendary manager offering some words of advice to Vince McMahon.
This advice pertains to how to improve WWE's sagging TV ratings, with last week's Raw averaging just 1.599 million viewers across its three hours. More worryingly, that Raw also saw the show slump to a record low when it comes to the ever-important 18-49 demographic, scoring just 462,000 viewers in that bracket.
Of course, while the TV ratings for this week's Raw have yet to come out, there have been numerous images from those in attendance last night to show the scary amount of empty seats at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minnesota for the promotion's latest red brand outing.
From Cornette, he believes that, amongst other things, a major overhaul of the WWE creative team and creative process is desperately needed.
"Not only does nobody believe this sh*t anymore, they don't believe the people involved in this sh*t. And the programme that they are putting on in WWE, with the people that nobody believes in or cares about, is also boring. It's homogenised and pasteurised and cleaned up and scrubbed up, and all the talent, except the few that stand out, move the same way and talk the same way because they are written for and trained the same way.
AdvertisementThe creative sucks because it's not anything that anybody gives a sh*t about. It's these hokey f**king entertainment stories. All you need to give wrestlers is a believable reason to be made at each other. You don't need to have 16 writers concocting a goddamn feature-length motion picture backstory. Just make it something that people can get into, then let them go out and say some sh*t and do some sh*t on their own like we used to, Vince."
Cornette then added:
"They don't care about what wrestling fans want to see, and they somewhat consider themselves the only game in town, which they used to be and still are on a worldwide basis, and they are not going to change it. To change it would offend some sponsors and was real enough that someone got upset or someone said something they shouldn't say."
On how to start to fix the problems with WWE, James E. concluded:
"It would be to fire three-quarters of the creative team and just let the boys find some guys that can do their own sh*t and just let them do it. But they [WWE] don't want to do any of that stuff that would make it easier for wrestling fans to watch. They have, I guess, cornered the market on the amount of people that are going to watch boring sports entertainment, and they are serving those people well."
Love him or hate him, it's hard to dispute that Cornette has some extremely valid points here - all backed up by how saturated and often outright dull the WWE product has become in the past few years, with Raw in particular hitting record low after record law in recent times.