Links for September 2009

Below are links to some wrestling-related blog entries & articles that I found interesting during the month of September 2009.

• Rantables: #42 The Week In Review 8/24 – 8/30 — I agree with pretty much everything he has to say in this one.
• The 450 Splash: Dixie v PPV — Dixie Carter thinks that monthly TNA PPVs are not a good idea, but it’s not clear if she thinks they are too often or not often enough. With TNA talking about producing a new weekly show, and now talk about “shaking things up”, this can’t be good.
• Heelzone: Angelina Love Released By TNA — Sounds like this all due to visa issues (she’s Canadian, eh). Hopefully they’ll get this resolved quickly and get her back on TV. Oh, wait… this is TNA we’re talking about.
• Heelzone: Jeff Hardy Arrested — … after a search of his residence yielded 262 Vicodin prescription pills, 180 Soma prescription pills, 555 milliliters of anabolic steroids, a residual amount of powder cocaine and items of drug paraphernalia. The timing on this seems kind of suspicious. Did someone tip off the cops right after he left the WWE?
• The Burning Hammer’s blog: WWE and Monday Night RAW — Another person that thinks the WWE product, especially the Monday night show, is not as compelling
• No Cash Back: Women’s Wrestling Sucks? — A video compilation of some high impact women’s wrestling. That first leap from the rafters is insane.

As I run across things, I’m also going to be adding them to my Delicious bookmarks page (http://delicious.com/drdarindavis). You can also find the last 10 of them on the right side of the page towards the bottom.

Monday Night Boos

What do you do when your guest host gets booed by 80% of the audience?

The WWE is continuing to try to insert themselves in the talk show circuit (see WWE + Talk Show = Raw), by booking celebrities as guest hosts on their  live Monday Night Raw program. If you’re a celebrity with something to plug, you’re in. The guest host usually does some kind of schtick, and the WWE bends over backwards and kisses their ass. WWE “Creative” writes the whole show around them and sets up some matches that the guest host pretends to book on the fly. Since the host is expected to be well liked, the WWE gets more viewers and the celeb gets to plug their wares to a different type of audience.

Except this week.

This week’s guest host was the Reverend Al Sharpton. Reverend Al was there as part of his tour to promote literacy among minorities. Noble cause, sounds good so far.

But Raw was broadcast live this week from Albany, NY, and apparently Albany doesn’t really like Sharpton. Not even a little bit. And did I mention it was live? No chance to “sweeten” the audio to tone down the chorus of boos. Just have to run with it I guess.

Jeremy Piven was the only other guest host I can think of that was booed, but only after he turned “heel” during the program. That was planned, and the crowd reacted as planned.

For a typical talk show, the audience gets in for free, provided that they win the ticket lottery or get in line for standby tickets. They are mainly there to see the host.

The WWE fans paid money to see wrestling. Considering that in the first hour and 14 minutes of the program there were only two wrestling matches, they had a lot to be angry about besides Sharpton.

WWE + Talk Show = Raw?

This whole WWE Monday Night Raw guest host idea (where they have a different guest be the “general manager” of Raw each week) seemed like “stunt casting” to me. Other than a little media attention, I couldn’t really see what the WWE was getting out of it. On top of that, the guests weren’t necessarily fans, but celebrities that just happen to have something to plug. Freddie Prinze, Jr? Seriously? What has he been in lately (other than Scooby Doo and Sarah Michelle Gellar)?

I wrote about it a little over a month ago (Raw Guest Hosts Not About Ratings?) but until I saw an article in Variety it wasn’t clear what they were trying to do. According to the Variety article, the WWE has basically inserted itself into the talk show circuit. If you’re a celebrity with something to promote, after you’ve been on Leno, Letterman, Conan, and Fallon, you head on over to Raw to get in a two hour plug.

My first reaction was that it seemed brilliant from a marketing and ratings standpoint. They may be reinventing or creating a new genre even.

From the article:

“We wanted a different way to get our product out there and talked about,” Stephanie McMahon, WWE’s executive VP of creative development and operations, told Daily Variety. “Tying us in with celebrities in Hollywood raises our awareness and gets a variety of people talking about us, which is always a positive place to be. Hopefully it will translate to new viewers.”

“They have something to promote, and we have the platform they need,” said Chris McCumber, USA Network’s executive VP for marketing and brand strategy.

Outside the ring, WWE is gaining considerable exposure, with ESPN having heavily covered [Shaq] O’Neal’s appearance on “Raw.” Clips from the show were played when [Jeremy] Piven and [Seth] Green did interviews on yakkers like “Live With Regis and Kelly,” “The Tonight Show With Conan O’Brien” and “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon.” Wrestlers are also getting invited onto the shows as a result of the tie-in with Hollywood talent.

Given how successful the guest hosts have been, WWE plans to continue having them appear on “Raw” at least through the end of the year, and possibly up to WrestleMania 26 next March.

But after thinking about it a little more, it seems like only a short-term strategy.

Sounds like Raw ratings are up, but the problem is the product they are putting on is crap, mostly due to how they’ve been tailoring the program to the guest.

They are getting more people tuning in than they normally would (ratings up 10% at the time of the article), and some of those people would not normally watch wrestling, but they are tuning in to watch a turd sandwich.

“Hey, thanks for tuning in. This programming will be worse than what we would show on a “normal” week, but we hope you still like it and will continue to tune in after we abandon this ratings stunt.”

Raw is supposed to be their flagship show, but their ECW and Smackdown programs have better content. What’s their strategy for keeping an audience after the guest host thing ends? They run the risk of losing nearly all of the new viewers and some of their old fan base.