WWE legend TJ Wilson recently appeared on an episode of Insight With Chris Van Vliet, where he talked about a number of topics including his day-to-day process as a WWE producer.
Wilson said, “Yeah, well, first of all, I’ll have the production meeting in the day, that’s the first thing I do. Then get out of the production meeting, then yeah, then get with the talent, then start kind of strategizing and figuring out, you know, a lot of things factor into these matches how much time we have? Is it two segments? Is it three segments? Is it one? Where are we on the show? Is there another? Since I work with the women almost exclusively, is there another woman’s match on the show? Okay, what are they doing? Then we’re going to do very different. So if there are two on that show, or three, keep them all very different from each other. There are a lot of moving parts and a lot of a lot of different aspects that go into it. I mean, you know, it sounds so crazy, but a four-minute match and a seven-minute match are very different. In terms of putting it together, it’s very different. Just in terms of like, there’s just a lot more, I’ve had this conversation a bunch with Bayley but like, so a four-minute match, or a seven or eight-minute match. Again, let’s just say even set, let’s say 10. A 10-minute match, you know, if you mess up a couple of things in the beginning or maybe your ideas when you’re putting it together, maybe they weren’t exactly hitting in the beginning, you have a few more minutes to like, get out of that and be you know, in the whole match by the end can be totally different. In a four-minute match every, you know, you might plan let’s just say six things, let’s say five things, each thing is worth 20% of that match. Sure. So each thing now has so much more importance in the shorter matches, it’s crazy, they’re a lot trickier to put together than the longer ones a 20-minute match is obviously you know, you have to feel that 20 minutes and if the story is right, that actually shouldn’t be that hard, honestly, but a five-minute match is a little trickier to put together than a 20-minute match if you can believe that. Again cardio and all that is a whole different ballgame. But a five-minute match is tricky because you know whoever is losing they want to make sure that they look good before the losing, you have, you know three or four minutes to do that you know it’s the time crunch is very different.”
You can check out the complete podcast in the video below.