With AEW and WWE NXT going head to head starting this week, WWE's Triple H sat down with Brian Fritz of The Sporting News to discuss WWE NXT on the USA Network and discussed AEW
highlights from the conversation:
Growing NXT:
"It's a funny thing. I haven't had a day or a period go by in NXT over the last five years on Wednesday nights where it sat on the (WWE) Network that I haven't thought about making it better. I always want it to be better. I want the product to be better. You do things for a while, maybe that gets stale. You want to switch to something else. That's constantly about improving the product, but in this moment on USA, you continue down the same path of wanting it to be better but you also want to embrace the thing that it is that makes it different and makes fans engage with it on a different level.
There's a reason why the NXT brand, while we already have a large key demo of 18-34-year-olds, there's a reason why NXT resonates with that so heavily. You want to embrace that. And while the platform changes, I'm looking to run towards that difference, not away from that difference, and make it more of the same or more or something else. Any fears that it's going to become something that it isn't or shift or anything like that are unfounded because if anything, we're going to make it more of that. "
Whether there is a Wednesday Night War:
"It's a funny thing. I don't hear anybody going the Tuesday night sitcom wars are off the chart. It's just a genre of entertainment in a way and to say there's this war, first of all, for me, it comes down to putting on the best show and I've been saying this over and over. Since day one, we've been on Wednesdays on the network. Since day one, I have thought about trying to make each show better than the one before, trying to raise talent to another level, trying to make this product the best product it can be while embracing its difference from "RAW" and from "SmackDown" and everything else that's out there.
We have the opportunity five years, in or whatever it is, to stay in our time slot, go to the No. 1 cable channel on television and expand it so there's more opportunity for everybody, but the goal is the same. It doesn't matter to me if there's another show on that night. It doesn't matter to me if there's somebody else in the space. I'm not concerned with that, especially not yet given the fact that so far, they've held four, five shows. And they've been great. But they're one-off shows.
Fifty-two weeks a year, two hours live every week is a different animal. Totally different animal. So, until that's started happening and happened for a while, because an immediate splash ... People have asked me right now, we had tremendous success last week (the Wednesday, Sept. 18 edition) with the rating for NXT, over a million people watching. The rating was great. A 200 percent increase in the 18-34 demo. On every level. I'm happy with that, but to me, this is a marathon. It's not a sprint.
When we got this opportunity on USA, it was an opportunity to stand at the starting line of a marathon. I'm interested in the long haul. I'm interested in what this company has done for 50 years, with that they've done for 30 (years) with "RAW, what they've done for 20 (years) with "SmackDown" which is what this company does better than anybody else on the planet: week in, week out, live sports entertainment and doing what we do. And it doesn't matter what's out there.
There's competition that we've dealt with for years. You can look back and say a brief period with WCW, but the competition we've dealt with for years is the NFL, is Major League Baseball. It's large scale sporting events. It's political debates. It's everything that is out there and that's what we deal with. So, my goal is to put on the best show possible every single week and we'll see what the future brings because right now, it's just a bunch of speculation over two-week programming that hasn't even started yet and there's no track record of success long-term of a two-hour, weekly live event in any way, shape, or form."
What He Learned from WCW vs. WWE:
"I have learned something every single day that I have been in this business since the day that I got in it. It's a funny thing; sometimes people use the developmental comment. Everybody that's in this business is developmental because if you don't believe that this business changes on a day-to-day, week-to-week, year-to-year basis, you've already failed. It changes.
Fans’ opinions change, their thoughts change, what they're willing to accept changes. The way people view things, the way they talk about it through social media and everything else, the way they consume the product and the in-betweens of the product changes. That, in and of itself, means it's all developmental because you're trying it all on every single day and seeing what works and what doesn't. Anybody that thinks differently, they've already lost because it changes.
I've picked up things along the way and, you're right, we've been through this before. We've been through this with WCW. We've also been through it with TNA. I haven't heard that brought up a lot, but that's a fact. What is the level of what it is right now? I don't know. I don't know until we see, but I hope they bring the best product that they can for fans. I hope that they do and we'll bring ours and then we'll go from there. But until I see what the product is, it's hard for me to even comment on it because there is no product right now, not on a two-hour live basis every week."
