Fox Wants Smackdown To Be Less Comedy, More Sport

[Spidey Revivey]

It's making the rounds that Fox wants WWE's blue brand to be more sports-centric, and that does make sense given where it will be - part of the sports block. Odds of there being a few sports personalities making appearances to promote themselves will be relatively high too, reports say.

Honestly I'm not sure if I dig a sports direction. When I hear that, I imagine a duller show. Without comedy we wouldn't have some of the larger than life personalities like Broken Matt. I wouldn't mind seeing some change to the product, but it's not like the brand isn't athlete-centric already. Curious to how it will go though and even more curious to what you guys think.

 

[Psykohurricane55]

So technically, they want smackdown to be more like raw. It will be a interesting superstar shake up next year as I feel like a lot of the workhorse that raw has right now like the shield and Finn balor might get drafted to smackdown while the comedy characters like r truth, Carmella and the new day might get put on raw.

 

[Jack-Hammer]

Raw? It sounds to me like Fox wants SmackDown to be something more along the vein of NXT instead of Raw. When it comes to the corny, sports entertainment themed comedy, Raw can be far worse than SmackDown and it often is. NXT feels more like a "sport" than the rest of the WWE product and a big part of that is how it's presented. They don't have schizophrenic black guys hosting talk show segments in NXT, they don't have company executives waste TV time by dancing in the middle of the ring, they don't have "One Night in Milwaukee" nonsense going about. It's treated and comes off more serious and, personally, that suits me because seeing garbage go down like the opening of SmackDown 1000, which happens too often on the main roster, makes me embarrassed to be watching sometimes.

So yeah, if Fox forces Vince to treat SmackDown seriously instead of it just being his own private little domain where he can put whatever goofy, outdated crap HE thinks is funny on our screens, then more power to 'em.

 

[Psykohurricane55]

But in the end, I feel like you need to have a little comedy in your product to be entertain. I personally loved smackdown 1000 mostly because the balance between comedy and wrestling. A serious product for a lot of casual fans which is what fox hope to get by having the show be more sport oriented will just get them to change the channel because the one problem with a serious presentation is that it's just that serious. You got nothing to hook the audience and comedy segment do help hook the fans in the product. When you look at smackdown 1000, which segment where the most over in the broadcast, the evolution segment and the r-truth segment.

 

[enviousdominous]

Prowrestling does many things for many people. If you take one aspect of it away, then it just doesn't feel right to me.

Of all the prowrestling organizations that have existed, the WWE seems like the one that produced the best balance of all the ingredients that make a good prowrestling show. You get your stupid fun, and gritty passion in very easy to digest doses.

I see Fox trying to have influence in a product of which they're heavily invested, but they're also Fox. Fox the channel is the Liberal arm of Rupert Murdoch's media empire, and I highly doubt that anything that the WWE could produce in the way of comedy could make Fox executives cringe worse than the proposed plot to a new Family Guy episode. There's also the option to propose something absolutely insane, and talk down the Fox executives from there.

Think about it; WWE creative proposes that Broken Matt Hardy will laugh hysterically at R-Truth while R-Truth wrestles an invisible grizzly bear. Fox is all "We don't think that an imaginary grizzly bear is conducive to our sport vision" so the WWE is all "Then we'll have R-Truth wrestle the ghost of Teddy Roosevelt" and Fox is like "Sure, whatever".