Santino Marella Reveals Sitcom Idea He Pitched to WWE

– During a recent interview with The Ten Count’s Steve Fall for Wrestling News.co, former WWE Superstar Santino Marella discussed his WWE run and an idea for a sitcom he pitched to Vince McMahon that would’ve had him and Beth Phoenix. Below are some highlights:

Santino Marella on pitching a sitcom for him and Beth Phoenix: “I pitched a sitcom. I think it was one episode. So I wrote it and it was Beth Phoenix and I and it was called, ‘Somebody loves Santino.’ It was basically Beth Phoenix, like, our home life. I got some of the guys from the Online to do some editing and I added some canned laughter. I waited around one night after RAW outside Vince’s office and I gave him the CD. I said, ‘Hey, this is an idea I had,’ and he watched it. He said, ‘Yea, we’re going to do it.’ He assigned a writer to do a real pilot for three episodes. but there was this, like, what do you call it, like, a tragedy of errors or whatever that, like, the writer got Lyme disease. Then the writer broke his hip. Then the writer’s father died, and you know, this guy’s trying to put together three funny episodes. One episode was funny, A couple of episodes were funny. One was horrible. When we put it together, the WWE, kind of, you know, a little bit higher budget pilots, they weren’t funny, and it was like, ‘Yeah, we’re not doing it.'”

On where he differed on the idea with Brian Gewirtz: “The original one that I did, I thought was better. So we had a little bit of a difference of opinion, Brian Gewirtz and I. He wanted to do a little bit of like a Curb Your Enthusiasm type camerawork. I wanted pure Disney, canned laughter, that standard sitcom backdrop with the stairs on an angle. I wanted it to be for kids. He wanted it to be, I guess, you know, for a little bit of an older audience, but it really never got going.”

On how Santina Marella was supposed to only last for one night: “Santina was supposed to be one night only, and it was just so funny. Like, you know, people that were in gorilla, like Vince was pissing his pants It was so funny and so she stuck around for a few months.”