Renee Young: WWE Backstage Felt Like Another Kick-Off Show

When WWE Backstage officially premiered in November 2019, it was touted as being a FOX show and not a WWE show. Fans were told that the show would touch on the tough topics and that nothing would be off-limits. That wasn’t exactly the case.

The show was canceled in June, which ultimately led to host Renee Young decided she was going to leave WWE.

“I was a little surprised in the sense that, we got a vague email, ‘we have a Zoom call today.’ I was like, ‘What?’ I message a producer and go, ‘Is this bad news?’ He’s normally great about keeping me in the loop and he didn’t respond to me. I was like, ‘Oh shit, something is up.’ It sucks that Backstage got canceled, I think it was starting to get into its groove,” Renee told Jimmy Traina on the SI Media podcast when asked about the show being canceled. “The show still could have been more than it was. To me, it started to feel like another WWE kick-off show, and that’s not what the heart of the project started out as. That was disheartening to me. Going to work for FOX, I was like, ‘Hell yeah, now we can get out from under the thumb.’ You hear the stories about being overproduced (in WWE). To get away from that and be under the FOX umbrella, I was like, ‘We can finally do some stuff.’ No, we can’t. Our hands are still tied.”

When CM Punk joined the show, fans thought he wouldn’t be held back in what he could say. It rarely turned out as such as the show generally avoided tougher topics such as releases or drug test failures, generally sticking to what happened on-screen.

“He didn’t do anything all that controversial to upset people. At first it was like, ‘Eh, what’s he going to say?’ Once he was on, it’s not like he just wanted to shit on everything, what’s the point of that? People expect that to a certain degree,” said Renee about Punk joining the show.

Elsewhere during the interview, Renee discussed her current status, saying she wouldn’t be appearing in AEW anytime soon as her non-compete clause lasts for ‘quite a while.’ You can find her full comments by clicking here.

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