Eric Bischoff Says No Faction Since the nWo and DX Has Had a Real Purpose

Eric Bischoff says the factions that have come along since the nWo and DX have been missing one key ingredient. On the latest episode of 83 Weeks, Conrad Thompson compared the nWo collecting WCW’s championships in 1996 to the Four Horsemen holding all the gold in the Crockett era. Bischoff said modern factions have a look and an attitude but never a clear purpose, set the Bloodline aside as a different kind of story, and explained why he doesn’t expect another faction to ever be as important as the nWo. You can check out his comments below:

On What Modern Factions Are Missing:
“That’s such a good point. And I’m glad you brought it up, because I think about this from time to time whenever I see a new faction being presented on television. You can go back to every faction that’s come together post-nWo. I’d like to talk about them all — and I don’t want to pretend that I’ve watched all of them closely, but I think there are several common denominators. One is, none of them come close to the nWo or DX. They just don’t, as hard as everybody tries. Now, we’re going to put the Bloodline story off to the side for a moment, because it deserves a separate kind of analysis. It’s a different kind of angle. To be honest, it’s not a takeover angle.

“But my point really is going to be, without beating it to death, none of these factions ever have a purpose. They have a look; they have an attitude. They don’t have a purpose. What are they there to do? Why did they form this faction? What are their goals? If that identity, that purpose, that intent — whatever word you feel you need to use — isn’t clear right from the beginning and doesn’t become a part of the faction’s personality, because the faction has to have a personality, not just the people in it, then what do you have? You’ve got three, four or five people that are all hanging out together, cutting promos together and running in each other’s matches, but there’s no real mission. And if there is, it’s never clear. Certainly not to the audience in a way that compels them to stay tuned every week to see what this faction is going to do next, and whether or not they’re going to achieve their stated goals. Well, if they don’t have a stated goal, why do I care? It’s just another faction, and that’s what almost every one of them has been since.”

On If There Will Ever Be Another Faction Like the nWo:
“People say to me, ‘Will there ever be another faction as important as the nWo?’ I don’t think so. A lot of that just has to do with the nature of television today and how it’s consumed, and just the fractured attention span of the audience in general would make that really, really tough. The fact that it’s already been done once makes it a little harder, because people will always compare. But the biggest issue is nobody’s figured out why. It always comes down to why.”

On the nWo’s Purpose:
“Why did the nWo come together? Well, creatively, they came together because they were a bunch of disgruntled, in many cases former, at least in the first two cases, former WCW employees who didn’t get treated with respect or make the money they should have made, so they [left], and they became huge stars in the WWF, and now they were coming back to take revenge. That’s the fundamental premise of that story. They were coming in to take over because they felt they were wronged.

“Now, you can debate whether that was a good premise or a bad premise, but at least it was a premise, and it was something that the audience did get a hold of, because it kind of felt real. Taking over the set, spray painting the truck, doing all that stuff that we did, that anarchy stuff that the nWo did, they did because they wanted to take over the company. That’s the thing that I think is missing the most in all of these attempts to create these factions that never go anywhere, because we don’t know where they were going to start with.”

If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit 83 Weeks with a h/t to 411mania.com for the transcription.