In a recent interview with Stephanie Chase, Chris Jericho talked about AEW be willing to take risks and brought up a segment that TNT executives were not happy with:
“AEW is as successful as we are because we’re not afraid to take a few chances and we’re not worried about taking some chances and not worried about getting slapped on the wrist if we do something that we shouldn’t do. We just don’t do it again but there hasn’t been that many times. Like I said, for me, there’s two times that I can recall that they said, ‘Don’t ever do that again’ and I was like, ‘Okay. I had no idea.’ One of ‘em actually was when we beat up Dustin Rhodes when I was feuding with Cody [Rhodes] way back at the beginning and we beat him up in the parking lot and then as we left, I lit up a cigar and they did not like that. ‘No smoking allowed on the show.’ They were super, super angry about it. ‘No smoking allowed’ and I was like, ‘Really? Out of all the things, that’s what they’re mad at?’ But they were very adamant that they did not want any smoking on the show and if you do this again — I don’t know if this was actually ever used but the way it was told to me was like, ‘We’ll pull the show if you guys do this again’ so it’s like all right, I don’t need to be smoking.”
