Eric Bischoff Explains Why He Can’t Get Excited About WWE Product, Calls WWE ‘Sanitized & Filtered’, What In AEW Excites Him

On the latest edition of 83 Weeks, Eric Bischoff talked about how the sanitized nature of WWE’s product makes it hard for him to get excited about it, while the promos in AEW excite him. Highlights are below.

On preferring the less scripted promos in AEW to the heavily scripted ones in WWE: “The less scripted a promo is, it’s so much better. That’s one of the things that I think is, that I really enjoy about AEW over the WWE product, is the interviews tend to just feel so much more organic and real to me. It’s the favorite part of, it’s not just because I’ve been in the business for 30 years, for me the best part of wrestling as a fan was always the promos, always. Those are the things I remember when I think back to when I was a kid and even growing up in Detroit when I was really young, seven, eight, nine years old, watching wrestling, certainly by the time I got to Minneapolis, I remember some of the matches, but I remember a lot more of the promos.”

“When you get a guy like Ric Flair, Arn Anderson now, and there were others, Chris Jericho’s certainly at that level, that can go out there, they know the point they are going to make but they don’t know exactly how they’re going to make it until they’re in the moment, those are the interviews that really make me love the product.”

On what is missing for him from WWE: “And I think that’s what is missing for me, and again, this is not a bash WWE, because there are people there that I love and that I’ll always support, and enjoyed working for the company, have a ton of respect for everybody from Vince McMahon on down, so this is not a bash WWE thing, but this is just me talking about what I like, and I think one of the things that makes it hard for me to watch WWE is the quality of the promos are so flat, I’m searching for a word, they’re just not real, very few of them, not all of them, but the vast majority of them are so heavily scripted and so not the person that’s trying to perform it. There’s nothing organic about it, there’s nothing that feels real, there’s nothing that’s remotely believable in so many of those promos that it actually takes me out of my enjoyment of the match. If you don’t care about the talent, or you’re not buying into the talent or you’re not buying into the talent’s emotion that they’re trying to convey, it’s really hard to get excited about the match. And that’s unfortunately one of the things that I run into. The WWE is just so sanitized and so filtered that it’s hard to get excited about it. For me. Other people love it, and God bless them all, but when you see a guy like Ric Flair and Arn Anderson and the Steve Austins and the guys that can really go out, Mick Foley, another one, guys that can just wing it, Chris Jericho as I mentioned, and can deliver a great promo and create emotion that didn’t exist before the promo, that’s the fun part of this business for me.”

If using any of the above quotes, please credit 83 Weeks with an h/t to 411mania.com for the transcription.