A recent episode of the “Keepin’ It 100” podcast hosted by Konnan featured an interview with WWE Senior Vice President of Live Events “Road Dogg” Brain James. During the discussion, Road Dogg was asked if there was data provided that was used to target the demographics he was writing for while in WWE.
Road Dogg said, “We did have data analytics meetings all the time. Well, I mean, ratings minute by minute. But also, it was analytics meetings to gather information to help us write towards a set of individuals, or older men, or older women. But you know, at the time, we didn’t have any women on the writing team, on the creative team. What do we know about women? Just put them on the show and shut up. Then we hired Dana Warrior, so at least we had a woman’s opinion on there that helped us out of a couple of binds. There’s not any written, regular rules. The analytics was to gather information to try to write in that direction. But you know, I don’t think we ever really utilized that. I think we got the information, it was cool to have, but I don’t know that we ever changed our writing style one way or the other for it.”
Regarding who he had good chemistry writing for, he said, “Me personally, like (Randy) Orton and New Day. I also wasn’t dumb enough to put it in their voice or wasn’t dumb enough to write it and give them something and go, ‘Here’s what we want you to say.’ It was always a collaboration”
When asked about what he thinks happened with Bray Wyatt, Road Dogg responded:
“Truth be told, I think he’ll be back. I think we’ll see him a third time. It did get a little wacky. Right, wrong, or indifferent, I’ll probably get some heat for saying this, but I just feel like sometimes, Vince lets the writers do their thing, it kind of gets successful, and then he feels like he wants to play with it too. Then you just go like, Okay, well, let’s stay with this because we don’t want to just say this sucks, we want to quit or whatever, so let’s try to stay with this. Next thing, you know, you’re doing some of the crap he was doing later in his (Bray Wyatt’s) tenure.”
Road Dogg also commented on writing the show while it’s on the air:
“I don’t think this is inside baseball. I think everybody kind of knows it. I remember times where we were writing the second and third hour of RAW and the first hour was on the air. It’s crazy. I would say it’s impossible if we didn’t do it every Monday. It is impossible if you want it to be good.”
You can listen to the complete interview below:
(h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription)
