Max Landis Comments on What Needs to Change in WWE Creative

– Screenwriter, producer, director and wrestling fan Max Landis recently appeared on WrestleZone Radio, here are the highlights…

His Thoughts on The WWE Product: RAW is hemorrhaging viewers. Saying the show sucks is maybe a little extreme but it feels like there’s a real growing ambivolence towards the show itself. Wrestling goes through periods where you don’t watch the show. You just go on-line to talk about it. Then it pulls you back in and there are ebbs and flows. The quality of the show shifts every week. Recently we have been in sort of a weird era where it doesn’t feel like much actually happens on the shows. It feels like a lot of people are sort of in holding patterns. It feels like we are seeing a lot of the same old-same old. More so really than ever before. Which is, I think, hurting the show for a lot of people.

Did Monday’s Show Provide Improvement?: The problem is that it’s still… listen to the way you are talking about it. You are talking about it like it’s three different shows. Whereas if you were talking about Game of Thrones you would say the whole episode was good. Wrestling is not a three ring circus even tho it’s structured like one. WWE Monday Night RAW works best when it’s written like a TV show. When everything crosses over with everything else. People talk fondly about the Attitude Era and that’s because there was a lot of connective tissue between the segments. Most of the best remembered episodes of RAW are the ones in which events shake an entire show rather than a single moment. The NEXUS storyline took over all of RAW. There was no storyline where you didn’t feel like the NEXUS was somewhere in the backstage area. It needs to feel like a salient, complete world. It’s cool that Roman won, good for him, and it was cool to see him punch Vince but there are only so many times you can punch Vince. There’s only so many times you can spear Triple H. There’s only so many times Roman can say, “Tator Tots,” and Stephanie can slap someone before we’ve seen it again and we are back where we started. There needs to be a revolution in the writing of the show. By revolution I really just mean a step backwards. Look at our villains right now. Who are your threatening villains? The League of Nations are baffoons. The Wyatt Family look like losers all the time. Stardust is a cartoon villain. The only threatening villain is Kevin Owens and Kevin Owens just lost. There needs to be some sort of change in what’s happening. There needs to be some sort of flip. People didn’t cheer or care when Roman was beating Sheamus. People cheer when Roman attacks Triple H. Why is that? Because Triple H is not a loser. Triple H is a real villain.