Bruce Prichard Prefers The Quarterly Pay-Per-View Format, Says It Allows For Better Storytelling
WWE Executive Director Bruce Prichard prefers the simpler times of WWE only having four major pay-per-view events per year.
Nowadays, WWE runs at least one pay-per-view every month and sometimes, they even run two pay-per-views in consecutive weeks. As a result, stories move a lot faster than they used to in the early 1990s when Hulkamania ruled over WWE.
Speaking on the most recent episode of his Something to Wrestle podcast, Bruce Prichard, who now oversees the direction of both Monday Night Raw and Friday Night SmackDown as WWE Executive Director, revealed that he misses the old format of quarterly pay-per-view events.
When asked by Conrad Thompson if he prefers the old style, Prichard would say that it was “a simpler time” and that schedule allowed for stories to be digested easier by the audience.
“It was all syndicated TV, so you saw it in your local market at different times throughout the week, usually on a Saturday morning or Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning,” Prichard began. “That would promote your local events and you did live events and then, once every three months, you had this big event that was hyped, so it was a much simpler time.”
He continued, “It was a time that you could take your time in telling a story and allow things to develop and allow people to get behind something, really get invested in it versus, ‘hey, this is going to happen. Bam, that’s why it happened. Bam, there it is. Hope you liked it. Bam, here’s what’s next!’
“It was a simpler time, and I think that stories were allowed to play out longer and that they were probably a little easier to understand and everyone got it because it wasn’t so fast.”
Fast forward 30 years later, the 2020 SummerSlam event occurred on Sunday, August 23. Bam, seven days later, WWE Payback will be taking place on Sunday, August 30, 2020, live on WWE Network.
In that very same podcast, Bruce Prichard tells a funny story about Vince McMahon not wanting to meet the Undertaker in July of 1990. The WWE CEO believed that Mark Calaway had no special qualities and was just “a tall basketball player.” You can learn more about that at this link.
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