Thought of the Day: Booking vs. Writing
This is something that will make perfect sense if you watch NXT, which you should.Something that WWE is really bad at for the most part anymore is booking week to week television. Take the Bryan vs. Corporation story. Every week so far, the events of the show are wrapped up clean and neat before the end of the episode. The overall story will continue the next week, but the events of one week rarely directly connect to next week’s stuff. For example: Orton lays out Bryan with an RKO, but the next week that event is barely mentioned and it’s just Bryan trying to get the title back all over again. It’s very much like a regular TV show with a villain or a hero trying to accomplish the same goal week to week. In other words, they’re stand alone episodes.
Now on the other hand look at NXT or most older wrestling shows. The shows are booked week to week, meaning you can’t miss a single episode because things will have changed. That rewards fans who are around every week and makes for more entertaining TV shows. For instance in NXT, they alternate with various storylines so you’ll have to come back for a few weeks to get the next part of a story you watched. This makes for more interesting TV, and if you’ve got a good show, you’ll be brought up to speed every week. It’s a substantial difference and can really enhance how good a show can be.
WWE forgets that less can be more. When you have the roster like WWE does, I feel it would be better to showcase as much of that roster they have (especially with a 3-hour Raw) than to give one storyline so many segments. There’s a lot of other guys who could use the mic time, wrestling time and just flat out exposure. Even during the Attitude era, the WWE would showcase Vince McMahon about 8-10 times a show.
WCW in its Nitro heyday (1997-1998), I thought did a great job of at least exposing plenty of talent during the three hours their Nitros ran. Because of that, they had awesome cruiserweight matches that were given time to develop, mid-card matches and feuds that sometimes would be a pleasant surprise and main event feuds that were given ample time to develop. The Hogan/Sting storyline was the best creation of WCW during its Nitro days and also one of the best in history but it was too bad the actual matches between the two were horrible. Their feud was over a year in the making before they faced off at Starrcade and they did just a slow enough burn each week to keep you hooked.