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| Reigns is one of many wrestlers fucked over by WWE's and promoters' in general tendencies to do deferred payoffs Photo Credit: WWE.com |
The thing about that analogy is storytelling, which is what wrestling is supposed to be at its heart, is not like strip-mining. You can't refresh a vein after it's been run dry. To be fair, you can't refresh a story once it's been beaten into the ground, but the thing is you can renew the vein in wrestling. It's about treating what you're doing not as grift but as a narrative using the ring as your canvas. Narrative structure works fantastically well in wrestling. You have an eternal setting with a cast of characters that gets refreshed every once in awhile with firings and signings or what have you. You introduce conflict with introductory angles. Your climax the big angle where a turn takes place or, say, your antagonist crushes the protagonist's throat with a ring bell. Then the resolution happens with the big match at the end where the hero either conquers the villain, or he falls short but learns a lesson or whatever. Rising and falling action could be more angles, backstage segments, promos, or even tag matches.
The problem is when the promoter follows up the climax with more introductory stuff, or where the resolution has a false bottom where you get a continuance in the action, the deferred payoff. Doing it once or twice a year could work both to boost a gate and provide a sensible avenue within the narrative structure. Doing it all the time with every story, or prolonging it so much that the protagonist turns into hollow shell of the promise they started out as, is what makes people cynical towards calling wrestling an art.
WWE does this all the time, and it's a huge reason why analyzing the product critically is almost worthless at this point. They're never going to get to the fireworks factory in a timely manner, and they're going to run every matchup they do into the ground so deeply that it could turn into oil reserves under the massive pressure of the Earth's crust and part of its mantle. The classic example is continuing to delay the payoff to Roman Reigns' build. If they had allowed him to conquer Brock Lesnar at this year's Mania, it still would've been three years too late. However, WWE is not the only company that does this, and in fact, while they might be the market leader in it and might have influenced promotions far and wide to adopt blatant grift over storytelling, their examples may not even be the worst.
Look at Ring of Honor. In 2007, they had a fresh-faced crowd-favorite by the name of Tyler Black who was poised to be the breakout member of the Age of the Fall stable. He was put in contention for the World Championship, but they kept prolonging and prolonging the satisfying resolution to his story for so long that by the time he defeated Austin Aries in 2010, not only did he lose all his juice from when he started out on his journey, but he was already on WWE's radar. He signed, became Seth Rollins, and ROH really hasn't really recovered since, at least from a narrative standpoint. Sure, Sinclair Broadcasting Group decided to buy the promotion, and they've been able to shell out contract money that is able to provide a parallel avenue to WWE to have an American wrestling career, but at the same time, how much faith do people have in ROH to provide satisfactory results, let alone cutting edge ones? It's a huge reason why money feels like such a hollow metric for judging quality of wrestling promotions nowadays. WWE is going to get half-a-billion dollars from NBCUniversal and FOX every year for four years, starting in October of 2019. Does anyone think that at least the main roster product is any good?
Continually deferring payoffs is a practice that is so commonplace in wrestling that yields just the most dismal results, and yet people still keep doing it. Sometimes, I think it's not necessarily out of financial benefit anymore, but because it's a standard operating procedure. However, the procedure is broken, and it needs to be fixed, not for fiduciary reasons, because again, WWE is getting fuck money, and ROH will have security as long as Sinclair throws some of its Trump-earned propaganda money its way. However, shouldn't you want to go to a show and not be incredibly bored by the main event? Shouldn't you want to have the guy you're ostensibly presenting as the top star to be universally loved, not just loved by not enough people to drown out the folks who don't like him?
In that case, it's probably time for wrestling promoters everywhere, from Vince McMahon down to Shindie McBumblescum, to take the phrase "deferred payoff" out of their vocabularies. In McMahon's case, he should probably fuck off and concentrate on his Respect The Troops Football League endeavor, where he's reported to be plunking down half-a-billion dollars of his own money to finance. Whoever comes into replace him as the grand filter should probably know something about narrative structure. Stephanie McMahon and Paul Levesque are the two major candidates, which doesn't strike a lot of inspiration for hope. I mean, Levesque runs a tight ship down at NXT, but it remains to be seen what he'd do tasked with five hours a week and the weight of half-a-billion dollars worth of expectations on him a year. Anyway, whoever okays the final scripts or who even makes one contribution to them should know something about how a story arc goes. The same goes for ROH, Impact Wrestling, Lucha Underground, any promotion.
One suggestion is to lean on people who have degrees in literature, English, or other writing-intensive majors in college. People like to make light of those kinds of degrees and the jobs they net, but at the same time, the entertainment industry has too much societal heft behind it to leave anything to people who don't know what they're doing. Wrestling is only different from movies and television and even sports that it doesn't have an offseason and runs on an eternal cycle. Having someone on staff making the creative decisions who knows the value of ending a story and the wherewithal to know when to begin a new one is valuable. For that reason, maybe WWE should be looking at lit or English majors to come aboard its writers' staff. Maybe instead of spending a billion hours in the gym, Stephanie McMahon or Levesque could take a few post-graduate courses on creative and critical writing.
Of course, WWE might have no impetus to do this, because again, fuck money. However, it could learn a lesson from other entertainment conglomerates. Disney doesn't really have to make movies as good as their output. Even shit-ass movies like Suicide Squad from the Warner Bros. studio or Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones from before they owned Lucasfilm made bank. But when you at least try to make good movies, or at least movies where a large chunk of people can agree that they're good even if no overwhelming consensus gets reached, you find it a lot easier to grease the wheels to make more money. I know this is a gross argument, because really, the McMahon family could all be out on the streets tomorrow and I wouldn't care one bit. However, one would think their mindset shouldn't be so complacent towards the shit they churn out. Besides, they're obsequious for positive press, and even is submitting material for the fucking Emmy Awards. Don't you think they'd want to get money and critical acclaim?
For promotions far outside the margins, however, it's antithetical to survival not to have a product that has buzz. Sometimes you can do it just by booking the wrestler who's really good at working like Matt Riddle or the nostalgia act with wheels like PCO. However, you make your own stars by giving them memorable stories to star in, and those stories are only memorable if they end. Magnum TA avenging losing Baby Doll to Tully Blanchard isn't beloved if he doesn't make Blanchard say "I quit" in a cage. Ricky Steamboat getting his throat crushed with a ring bell probably doesn't resonate at much if he doesn't take out Randy Savage at WrestleMania III. Bryan Danielson's quest to slay the giant Takeshi Morishima doesn't feel as epic as it does now if the latter dropped the ROH Championship to Roderick Strong and then fucked back off to NOAH. Delaying payoffs only dampens the excitement until people just get too cynical to care about the stories you tell. Once you do that, all the money in world won't save you when people start throwing beach balls around or even worse, stop coming to the show altogether.
