Credit: Camelclutchblog.com
Former WWE writer Seth Mates recently spoke about working for WWE, the current booking of the company and more. Here are the highlights…
On Writing For Triple H: “I’d written a promo for Hunter once and Steph asked me to rewrite it because it was “too funny.” They’d told me to write a Hunter promo about Kane banging a corpse; where else do you go except “funny”? They thought this would be a serious, dramatic, money-making storyline that would get them compared to CSI and the Sopranos. But they had to figure it all out for themselves.”
On The Al Wilson Angle: “The Al Wilson stuff actually started because Vince was on a huge hook at the time for dreck like that, and we thought that if we gave him dreck in the divas division, then maybe he’d leave Brock-Taker alone,” Mates explains. “But we still got that stupid Tracy (the C-level actress who claimed an affair with Undertaker in 2002) storyline! We tried! But ultimately, no matter what you hear about guys reading comic books or whatever, creative is Vince and Hunter, and it’s not a democracy.”
On Batista Returning as a Face: “The Batista move was ridiculous,” Mates says, stating an accepted fact. “They’re hoping to ride the wave once his movie comes out, which could help them greatly from a business standpoint but kills creatively. At this stage, he’s the perfect heel, and I think you’re seeing that now. He’ll be a babyface again at some point, but coming back at age 45 in his skinny jeans and cleavage shirts, he’s a heel. The promo he cut on Bryan and the fans at Raw was perfect.”
On The Shield: “I love the Shield stuff. You can see that Roman Reigns is gonna be THE GUY, and I loved helping to build stuff like that, like we did with Brock back in 2002. Seeing what ‘The Machine’ at WWE is capable of when they WANT a guy to get over is pretty incredible. I also love everything Paul Heyman does. Greatest performer I have ever seen.”
On The Booking of Daniel Bryan: “THAT is what killed me about the pre-434 day reign of Punk and what kills me about the current Bryan stuff; the pieces are there but they don’t pull the trigger and give us what we want; we as fans will go along for the ride as long as we know we’re going somewhere. That’s all we ask! The Bryan-Orton stuff at SummerSlam was perfect, but Night of Champions taught the fans not to believe it even if Bryan won, and then they fizzled it all out after Hell in a Cell, hoping it would go away. They can call it “slow burn” all they want, but that’s just their way of salvaging the fact that they tried to kill the Bryan push in favor of Batista and it didn’t work. Like many fans, I’ll put up with a lot, but I can’t take the assembly-line, manufactured stuff, which unfortunately is what we’re gonna get now for the most part with the Performance Center. With Punk not coming back on Raw, I’m actually just about done coming back as a viewer. Being a fan has become homework, and I’m tired. And I’m sure the network is great, but I don’t want to watch wrestling on my computer, and I have enough DVDs already.”
