Eric Bischoff made his name creating a WCW product that was by design as different as possible from what WWE was producing in the mid-to-late ’90s.
Led by the nWo, it produced a period of unprecedented success for the company as WCW beat WWE for 83 straight weeks in the ratings and forced WWE to usher in its Attitude Era during a game-changing time in the business.
When asked if it’s possible to go after WWE in the same manner today by producing a product with a starkly different approach, Bischoff isn’t ruling it out but admits the task is much more daunting than it was even a few years ago with where WWE creative is right now under Triple H.
“It’s not as easy now, but it’s still very possible,” Bischoff said during a recent Zoom interview. “The truth is, if you would have asked me that question in 2018 or through 2019 I would have laughed and said, ‘Oh, hell yeah, here’s my list, right? Watch this.’ But WWE now, they’ve got very, very disciplined, nuanced stories. The discipline that I see in their storytelling is pretty amazing, from week to week. Obviously, from a production point of view, yeah, it’s gonna make it harder.
“But oh yeah, there are ways, and that’s where the art comes in. Otherwise, it’s a science. You just put things together and watch it work, the art comes in and again, finding out what can I do differently that the audience is going to embrace as opposed to reject.”
Doing so means taking some risks.
“Part of it is trial and error. You have to be willing to fail,” Bischoff said. “You know, if you’re afraid to try anything new, then you’re just going to be doing the same things you’ve been doing. You got to like the risk a little bit and try things. That’s what Nitro did. We just tried things. We tried things that nobody ever done.”
The 69-year-old Bischoff, who will be the executive producer of MLW’s “One Shot” show from Queens’ Melrose Ballroom on Dec. 5, said he would touch absolutely nothing about WWE’s creative right now, with one suggestion being to give the audience a great look at the person beyond their on-screen character.
“I would spend a little bit of time getting to know the talent outside of the arena,” Bischoff said. “It’s kind of one-dimensional. We see that character, we like that character, we’re entertained by that character, but we don’t really know that character. I’d like to know a little more about the person that made the character, not the creative person, but the person that became the character, because that helps me relate to him, helps me decide whether or not that’s somebody I’m interested in.”
For AEW, which Bischoff has railed against often on his 83 Weeks podcast, the biggest thing he’d change is making sure the company has a clearer vision of what it wants to be and how it wants to present itself. AEW is in the early stages of a hard reset, according to it’s champion Jon Moxley.
“What’s the one thing when someone describes your product you want them all to say, ‘I like AEW because,’ and make sure that because is big. It’s gonna be a statement,” Bischoff said. “It can’t be just ‘I like it because of the wrestling matches.’ OK, you’re welcome to the 10 percent of the audience. Focus on story, focus on the discipline that’s clearly lacking. Focus on the characters.
“They’re all kind of the same [In AEW]. They all look like they left Jiffy Lube for lunch. No offense to Jiffy Lube or the talent, because they’re not being required. It’s just like everybody shows up and does what they think is going to work that night. And that’s where I think the lack of vision comes”.
The biggest mistake a booker can make is to book for themselves and their personal tastes, which could cause them to lose a large portion of their audience, Bischoff said.
“They think everybody thinks just like them,” he continued. “And if I like something and I write it down on a piece of paper, by God, the wrestling audience is going to like it too, and more often than not, the opposite is true.”
Bischoff certainly made his share of well-documented mistakes even with all the successes he had with WCW, something he’s spent the past eight years looking back on in-depth on “83 Weeks.”
When asked if there was a philosophy he wished he had implemented differently at Ted Turner’s company that was eventually sold to WWE in 2001, Bischoff pointed to the skills he picked up when it came to “structuring story and developing story and characters” working on non-scripted television shows with his and partner Jason Hervey’s production company from 2003-19.
“It’s easier for me now to go, ‘OK, we want to achieve this, then we have to go do that,’” Bischoff said. “We have to build a story with more structure. We have to make sure we’ve got the plot points where we need them. We have to make sure that we’re bringing the audience on the journey, not just throwing stuff up against the wall and hoping they like it. But that’s a perspective that’s evolved over the last, really 20 years.”
