Quote:
Originally Posted by Blaster86
Just to steer this back to the point I was making: A big reason you see guys focusing so hard on trying to get over is that their time on TV is brief and may be a week or two before they're shown again. It's bloated roster issue that I am talking about. Trimming that reduces the need to try and do too much with what they get.
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And allows for more coherent story telling.
You didn't watch the Sopranos, Game of Thrones, Friends, etc or any of the other successful TV shows every week wondering "I wonder if Tony Soprano is going to be on the show this week".
AEW (and WWE) have actually both struggled with that.
It's a fine balance because you don't want to oversaturate viewers either, but I'd argue it's hard to oversaturate somebody when you're building them up as a star.
Then once they are a star they can appear less frequently (like Roman Reigns or Brock), and become more of the special attractions.
Smaller roster, consistent week to week stories, and consistent TV time is how you build starts.
Both in the Attitude era in the 90s, and this recent WWE boom came after they really trimmed down the roster, and focused on trying to build up stars with consistent time week after week.
WCW's success also came from that...the show was centered week after week around the original NWO, Sting, Goldberg, and the talented mid card with guys like Eddie, and Jericho.
Once the roster got bloated with the rest of the guys the WWE had cast off that's when the product struggled.
It's not identical but there are a lot of similarities to how AEW has struggled with roster size and managing the talent now, to the 90s when Bischoff had an open chequebook and signed all the WWE wrestlers then.
Actually makes me laugh a bit when Tony and Eric are going after one another because it's the Spider-Man pointing at each other meme a little bit. Both had some great ideas but both guys needed somebody to reign in their roster growth, and both needed to exert more control over their roster as the boss.