The Three Words That Ruined WWE

WWE was left to draw on an apparently stable core of consumers around which former Co-President George Barrios shaped the company's overarching strategy: to "super-serve" content. "They will consume just about anything we throw at them," he said in 2017, followed, in time, by the end credits to Curb Your Enthusiasm.

The rise of NXT made such a strategy halfway tenable; it proved to the consumer, after years and years of stylistic homogeny, that WWE was capable of producing content that didn't feel remotely in-house - so much so that it felt, instead, like art.

The etymology is imprecise, but the wild fluctuation in quality - NXT was an intoxicating blend of pulsating action and feel-good vibe, worked by the sort of talent WWE would never have touched, much less wholeheartedly embraced, whereas WWE was just WWE - coined a term. NXT was NXT - a hybrid of charming developmental and state-of-the-art in-ring. It was so drastically better than and different to what was simply known as "WWE" that a pejorative term entered the lexicon in contrast: the main roster. The term, once coined, became the established language with which to describe WWE because it was almost disrespectful, certainly inaccurate, to describe NXT as the same thing.

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