WWE is currently the largest wrestling promotion in the world, but a former writer pointed out some issues they have with their pay-per-views. Vince Russo commented on the current WWE pay-per-views, and how they did not tell stories the same way that they used to.
Vince Russo is an experienced former WWE writer and during his tenure with the company in the Attitude Era, brought a lot of innovation to the style of the company's storytelling.
In a recent interaction with Dr. Chris Featherstone on Sportskeeda's Off The SKript, Vince Russo talked about the issues he felt that current WWE pay-per-views had. Russo revealed that when he had been writing the WWE product, one of the changes that he had made was for the pay-per-views to involve storytelling, and not only feature matches.
"The one thing that we really did that was never done before is, we really made the pay-per-views an extension of the television show. Up until this point, the pay-per-views were match after match after match after match. Bro, you can't do that when you have a weekly television show going on."
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He said that they made sure the pay-per-view matches were longer and they could do whatever they wanted there. But they also ensured that the stories kept going as well. That was the only way to make sure the audience tuned into WWE RAW the following night. Vince Russo went on to say that this was something that WWE was changing once again.
"We made sure that the matches were longer. The pay-per-views were where the wrestling fans got their wrestling. You want to go out and have a 20-minute match or a 30-minute match, knock your socks off! However, we do want to keep the stories going, and not only that, bro, we want to get them to RAW the following night."
Readers can check out the full interview below.
Vince Russo comments on issues with the 2021 WWE Royal Rumble event
Russo went on to talk about how WWE had abandoned that idea again and the current pay-per-views lacked the same amount of storytelling. He revealed that with the Royal Rumble, WWE proved that they were back to the old formula, of several matches on the same pay-per-view.
"I think now, they have got away from that again. We just saw the Royal Rumble, and now I think we're right back to match, match, match, match, match, match, match. I enjoyed doing that bro. It forced us to work on the pay-per-views, it was a regular television show, and it was really episodic and kept it going. I even feel like today, that's how they should do it, but they got away from a lot of things bro."
While this may be the case, current WWE pay-per-view matches usually involve interesting storytelling, with Roman Reigns and Jey Uso's match talking about their struggle to face one another thanks to being a part of the same family. WWE's style of storytelling has changed over the years and has a different appeal than it used to before.