During his recent Drive-Thru podcast, Jim Cornette addressed WWE’s viewership decline:
“It’s just, you have to undo a lot of needless damage that’s been done over the past few years where it’s just silliness. Just f**king silliness. We’ve talked about this. They have some of it on NXT but the majority of it’s on Raw where grown adults – Otis or Tucky or whoever – grown adults act like children with the mentality of children where they do and say things that nobody would ever do and say. And it’s obviously all tongue-in-cheek. It’s sketch comedy on the level of hee-haw. And then they have matches where most of the guys do the same s**t as everybody else does, and it’s just on this program they all look physically better and they’re better trained. But they’re not doing anything with some grit or realism to it, and it doesn’t have to be adult.
“I see the people saying ‘they went PG and it ruined them.’ Mid-South Wrestling was PG in 1984. We couldn’t cuss on television, broadcast TV at least in 1984, you couldn’t say – they didn’t want you to say – ‘crap.’ Innuendo was out. Except for violence and blood, wrestling had the cleanest language of anything on television. And there was no boobies, and there was no d**ks hanging out, and there was no sexual content. Except for then during the mid-80s the valet wars where you got to see women dressed in five times as much as they wear on any of the WWE programs now.
“It’s not about being PG or rated-R, it’s about being adult and real violence versus play violence, and creating or exposing or finding and letting them be real characters Pinocchio, real talent. That talks like they would talk and they wrestle like they would wrestle, and you put importance in either the matches or who wins the matches or what happens in the matches. Or whether people play by the rules. Or whether they cheat, or whether they steal something, or whether they lie about something. And you get the guys on your roster, whether it be anybody from WALTER to Kyle O’Reilly that actually look like they’re serious about this s**t and can pull it off, can that’s the way you get people invested. And then you give them some interesting things to f**king fuss over. And that’s sometimes the easiest part of it. Because once you get good talent you get the fans educated to the fact your product is serious and it ain’t f**king showbiz wrestling, then there’s all kinds of cool reasons for those people on the roster to f**king want to f**k each other in the ass.
“But they ain’t gonna do any of that, so I don’t know what they ought to do.”
(quote courtesy of WrestleTalk.com)
