During an interview with ScreenCrush.com, the Young Bucks talked about the struggles of producing television during the Covid-19 pandemic:
Nick: “The pandemic has screwed up a lot of week-to-week plans, but we try to keep the long-term ideas intact as best as we can. Of course it’s changed a few things. Some of the big stories that we had planned, we’re still doing. but some week-to-week matches sometimes have to change just because of the nature of what’s going on. You’ve got to really book on your toes here, and that’s the hard part, because you just never know who’s going to be available.
We take this really serious. If, for instance, someone has been exposed or was near someone that had Covid, Dr. Sampson’s not even going to allow that person to get on an airplane. So stuff like that changes things on a weekly basis.”
Matt: “It’s so hard. The way I describe it, it’s like if you’re a standup comedian and you’re telling jokes and you’re not getting laughs with the jokes so you don’t even know if the jokes are good. In a business like wrestling, it’s all about the crowd reactions. We gauge everything on the over-ness of the wrestlers and there’s no crowd to really gauge it off. And social media is so toxic, you can’t go off that anymore. Like, it’s really hard. I think you just have to have good instincts, and you have to go with your gut, because most of the time when you’re doing something good you can kind of feel it, you can feel the magic, you can feel the chemistry. You’ve got to go off that.
Nick and I have been doing this 16, 17 years. In the past, we went off of that crowd reaction and we would change things accordingly, even if we had a plan. Sometimes organically things just change and things happen and you just go with it. So yeah, it’s harder in this case, because you don’t know where you’re going sometimes. You would go “Well, in four to six weeks, we’ll see how the crowds react to this guy.” That’s not there anymore. So I try to put myself in the shoes of a fan. So if I was watching, this is what I would like. If I saw this, I would probably be rooting for this guy. Or if I saw the Young Buck characters doing this, that would make either like them or dislike them. It’s really just instinct. It’s like probably like writing any other television show. Now we kind of have to write it more geared towards as if it was just a standard television show and not a show with a live audience.
It has gotten better, I will say, just putting in a couple of hundred people, because man, you really need to hear that crowd reaction to get that energy. When you go out there, there’s nothing more embarrassing than posing to nothing and hearing nothing or coming out to an entrance song would no reaction. It’s almost like you’re living your worst nightmare [laughs].”
