The Disturbing Truth Behind Vince McMahon Selling WWE
Mega-business is a credentials industry; what hot, underground angle a person might have booked is of zero concern, because they aren't getting the job. They weren't credited on a television show known to the general public. NXT has hired a team of wrestling people in addition to "proper" writers, sure. But looking at those demos, they aren't going to evolve and run RAW. No, WWE will continue to recruit from more "accepted" forms of entertainment because Nick Khan has already said as much in a grim omen of the years to come.
"We're not a wrestling company. We don't use that term here," Khan said on the Colin Cowherd podcast recently, as if he were a chef that had just been referred to as a cook - as if pro wrestling was the lowest misinterpretation of what WWE does. In the post-Vince world, it is significantly more likely that you'll see a zombie movie tie-in than an unscripted promo.
Certain aspects of the show might improve. On RAW, everybody is a complete d*ckhead. Charlotte Flair and Rhea Ripley are presently feuding over which d*ckhead is the biggest loser. Nikki Cross celebrates her lucky escapes. Ricochet is an entitled little bastard. This deranged value system will at some point change. Even a hack has a grasp of what a hero should look like, and that hack with no knowledge of professional wrestling will enjoy more freedom to apply that most basic understanding to a product without Vince's bizarre, mean-spirited nature scribbling everything out with a red pen. But WWE wishes to cater to the biggest audience possible in a total misunderstanding of the universal fact - observable through something like a "real interaction with a fellow human being" - that most people do not even begin to or want to get pro wrestling.
Wrestling fans are a strange subspecies to the general public, but WWE no-sells this truism. This means, post-Vince, you will get the same simplistic, exposition-heavy brand of storytelling. They don't give a f*ck if you like it. They want 7.6 billion people to like it - 1 million dollars and one cent is worth so much more to these ghouls than 1 million dollars - and they will signpost that big sparkling net to make sure all of them can conceivably understand it.
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