Ten steps to improve TNA

[Guest bob_barron]

Todd Martin looks at NWA TNA

 

 

 

A Game Plan for NWA TNA

 

By Todd Martin

 

NWA TNA has had a rocky first year. They have had inconsistent programming,

and haven’t really been able to establish a clear identity. Most

importantly, all indications are the company is not even approaching the

weekly buy rate it needs to be profitable. That said, the promotion is not

without strengths. A number of NWA TNA workers have shown tremendous

promise as workers and as stars. I have been particularly impressed at

various points by AJ Styles, Jerry Lynn, Ron Killings, Amazing Red, Low Ki

and Elix Skipper. TNA has been able to utilize many stars of the past and

in doing so is attempting to reach the audience that WWE has turned off so

drastically the past few years. TNA is definitely not pointed in the right

direction, but it has building blocks that could be put together to create

a product pointed in the right direction. Here are 10 steps that NWA TNA

can take to create a successful promotion:

 

1) Figure out what you do better than WWE, and emphasize that. Figure out

what WWE is doing wrong, and emphasize that too. TNA is not going to

succeed if it is viewed as a second rate WWE. That is what it is doing with

its current direction. There is a lot the WWE is doing wrong. TNA needs to

try to do a better job at those things, and it will then provide an

alternative to WWE, as opposed to a “B” rate WWE. TNA needs to tell its

fans why it is better than the WWE right now. Have Mike Tenay talk about

how you don’t have to see the owner’s daughter all over the TV, or how you

don’t get a bunch of lame comedy vignettes with NWA TNA. Call WWE out for

portraying necrophilia, or using HLA as a cheap promotional tactic. There

are a lot of people disenchanted with WWE, and if you convince them NWA TNA

is better, you can attempt to pick up a chunk of that audience. That is

what Eric Bischoff did when Nitro started in 1995, and it worked very well.

Establish a unique identity for the promotion, and take pride in that

identity. ECW did not necessarily create the niche I would have created, as

it was too violent for my liking, but it created that identity and believed

so firmly in it that the fans couldn’t help but do the same. All the WWE

mistakes over the past two years make it easier for TNA to create its own

niche. Some of the most basic fundamentals of wrestling booking would

differentiate TNA from WWE. To begin with, have guys cut serious promos.

Don’t have them do goofy comedy or try to be cool heels. Have them cut old

fashioned “I’m going to kick your ass” promos that adds heat to the product

and realism. WWE handed TNA Raven, and he’s one of the best people in the

world at delivering that sort of interview. Konnan is a fantastic

interview. Ron Killings and Christopher Daniels have shown the potential

for that sort of interview as well. Figure out who can really talk, and

give them the stick. Create logical storylines. WWE doesn’t follow any of

its storylines through, and if TNA focused on creating an air-tight show

every week that is devoid of any semblance of a logical flaw, it can start

to get its fans invested in the storylines. These are just examples, and

TNA can elect to emphasize different factors. However, it needs to decide

what it does best, and then run with that.

 

2) Figure out what audience you’re aiming for. On one hand, TNA is aiming

for an older audience by bringing back the likes of Dusty Rhodes, Nikita

Koloff and the Road Warriors. On the other, it is producing a style of

television that is clearly aimed towards teenagers. A good product will

provide something for a number of different audiences. A bad product will

provide something to turn off a number of different audiences. That is what

TNA is doing right now. The new audience doesn’t want to see old guys that

they don’t know having boring matches. The old audience doesn’t want

illogical booking and 40 angles a show. Once NWA TNA knows who it is

chiefly marketing towards, it can then try to attract other groups without

compromising the core product. When it doesn’t know what its core product

is, there is a tendency to have no promotional direction.

 

3) Get a new top babyface and champion. That doesn’t mean that Jeff Jarrett

shouldn’t get a push. He’s a solid talent and is one of TNA’s most well

known stars. He should have a high spot, but he shouldn’t have the top

spot. It’s very similar to Triple H and Undertaker in WWE. Fans don’t think

of Jarrett as “A” talent, they think of him as “B” talent. That’s part of

why he did so poorly as a headliner for WCW. The fans never have and never

will accept Jarrett as a headliner. He doesn’t have the charisma,

particularly as a babyface. In order for TNA to get momentum, it has to

have a star that its fans believe is better than anyone in WWE. That’s not

Jarrett. There are a lot of choices as to who to build around. I think

Killings and Styles are the best choices, but regardless of who they

choose, they have to get beyond Jarrett as champion. The unfortunate

problem is that much like WWE, TNA has all sorts of political and family

alliances. It’s going to be hard to convince Jeff Jarrett, Jerry Jarrett or

Vince Russo that Jeff needs a more supplemental role. Hopefully they will

pick up on this eventually and start to build around someone else. It’s

very hard to create a fresh product built around top stars who aren’t fresh.

 

4) Dump Vince Russo. I don’t buy for one minute he isn’t involved in the

creative process. His fingerprints are all over the product. And that is a

big problem. Vince Russo does not have clue one about what professional

wrestling is. He does Vince Russo television really well. But his idea of

professional wrestling destroys the foundation of the business, even at its

most successful. I am firmly convinced that Vince Russo has done more to

destroy professional wrestling in less than 10 years than anyone else in

the history of the century old business. This is not the sort of person you

want involved in your promotion in any capacity, and the flaws in his

vision of wrestling are present in the TNA product right now. A lot of the

product is quite entertaining. The show opening interaction between Russo

and Tenay towards the end of December was compelling television. So was the

Tenay-Schiavone interaction this past week. The problem is that these

segments don’t build up future matches. The top stars of the show aren’t

even wrestlers. Mike Tenay is not a top babyface. He is an announcer. Even

if he is needed to do the mic work for the anti-Russo troops, he should

have someone else by his side every single time, getting that guy over.

Likewise, Russo needs to be getting other people over. But he isn’t. The

unquestioned top heel of the promotion is Vince Russo. All the angles flow

through him and all the wrestlers are either fighting against him or

fighting for him. He’s not a manager, he’s a McMahon. He’s more concerned

with his own ego than with the NWA TNA product. It is his view that

wrestling will never be as successful as it was when he was working for the

WWF, and that sort of defeatist attitude isn’t going to help a fledgling

promotion. He’s not even a wrestling fan. He recently remarked on a radio

interview that he doesn’t watch WWE wrestling, and there’s no way he would

watch wrestling if it meant missing “Everybody Loves Raymond.” Moreover, he

isn’t even a good television character. His promos are average, he has no

idea how to build up matches, and he has a tendency to bury the product. No

good can come from having Vince Russo around, and they need to get rid of

him. Traditionalism vs. new wave is an okay top storyline, even if is

somewhat passé following the NWO and DX. However, that is a lot different

from Vince Russo Friends vs. Vince Russo Enemies, which is what the product

is right now. There is a formula for how to book professional wrestling

that has been tried and true for decades. No one as influential in the

creative process as Vince Russo has ever had less of a grasp of how to act

on that formula. So keep the book the hell away from him!

 

5) Surprises cannot be the focus of the show. There is only a finite number

of people you can bring back as surprises. People enjoy seeing their old

favorites. It is a way to make the show exciting. However, it is not the

foundation of any show. The storylines and feuds need to advance to build

long term interest. Surprises are a short term remedy, but until the focus

is fully on the guys you know will be there and not on those who might be

there, the show will never pick up real steam. The constant flow of

surprises also sends the subliminal message to fans that the regular NWA

TNA performers aren’t good enough. TNA doesn’t have enough faith in them to

focus on them, and instead tries to get you to watch by focusing on

surprise guests. The surprise guests don’t put anyone over, and the result

is that the potential stars of the group never get over. TNA is clearly

booking to get a reaction from the internet on Wednesday nights, rather

than to build up long term programs. It’s WCW syndrome all over again. Why

are the lessons of that promotion so hard to digest? TNA ought to use

surprise guests from time to time in order to create intrigue, but it

should by and large advertise the most important performers on any given

show. If they are big enough stars and are tied sufficiently into the

storylines, they will help do better buy rates. If they aren’t, then using

them as a surprise in a focal point just disappoints the fans that ordered

the show anyway.

 

6) Stop referring to the demise of WCW and the decline in the popularity of

pro wrestling. No one wants to watch a TV show that constantly reminds them

the product is dying. Baseball fans didn’t want to listen to announcers

talk about a strike when a strike was approaching last year, and wrestling

fans don’t want to hear about how wrestling is dying. TNA needs to be

presented as hip, and as something better. There is a very limited audience

of hardcore wrestling fans who will support wrestling no matter what. They

enjoy hearing shoot comments about what happened to WCW. But the goal of

TNA needs to be drawing a bigger audience than that. That bigger audience

isn’t going to come when TNA constantly rubs it in your face that they are

a minor league product comprised of the lesser remnants of a dead promotion

that WWE didn’t even want. That’s not my framing of their promotion; that’s

their own framing. If the people in charge of your creative direction, like

Vince Russo, doubt whether the business will even exist in a year, they

shouldn’t be booking. The people in charge should have complete confidence

that what they are doing is going to succeed, and if they do the fans will

follow suit. WCW didn’t die because wrestling doesn’t work as an

entertainment form. WCW died because the people in charge made countless

mistakes that were obvious to everyone involved. If TNA avoids those

mistakes then there are no parallels that can be made between TNA and WCW.

 

7) Emphasize the X Division. The X Division was the strength of the show

last year. Since then, they have done a good job of defining better who the

X Division wrestlers are. The problem is, they don’t have lengthy matches

against each other any more. When Jeff Jarrett was doing radio interviews

hyping up TNA last year, he emphasized that the 2 hour no commercial

timeslot gave TNA flexibility to have longer matches if desired. They have

given up on that, however, ever since right around the time Russo became an

“on-air performer.” Matches are the backbone of wrestling. Have excellent

matches every week with Amazing Red, AJ Styles, Jerry Lynn, Kid Kash, Low

Ki, Elix Skipper, Christopher Daniels and company. Exciting lightweight

wrestlers is one of TNA’s strengths. Take advantage of that! Don’t stick

these guys into tag team matches with either of the Harris twins. TNA

doesn’t have to structure itself like Ring of Honor. However, it ought to

take advantage of the great wrestlers it has, and the best way to do that

is a strong focus on the X division, and the X division title.

 

8) Put together matches that have the potential to be good. The aspect of

NWA TNA that most resembles WCW at the end is the way they throw together

matches without any understanding of how to book professional wrestling.

Professional wrestling is not a sitcom where you throw together all sorts

of different “characters” and then have them interact in different

situations. Wrestling is about creating a group of heels that the crowd

dislikes, and a group of faces that the crowd roots for. They don’t have to

be simplistic cartoon characters, but they do have to clearly defined. You

then match them up against each other with an eye for making entertaining

matches that people will pay to see. Paul Heyman was always very good at

this in ECW, in terms of hiding people’s weaknesses and creating meaningful

feuds. Wrestling has a place for entertaining characters who cannot wrestle

particularly well. However, you have to be careful with them so you don’t

have a series of bad matches. On last week’s show they had matches

featuring David Flair vs. Jerry Lynn, Mike Sanders vs. Ron Killings, and AJ

Styles vs. Larry Zbyszko. These are matches that didn’t even have the

potential of being good, and in making them, they squandered the talents of

Lynn, Killings and Styles. More attention needs to be paid to who they

match up. As Dave said on the last TNA report, Low Ki should never be in

the ring with Brian Lee. TNA needs to set its wrestlers up for success in

the ring, not doom them for failure. Not every match clicks, but there are

some matches that clearly will not click. Those matches need to be avoided,

unless they serve a clear purpose. There are people involved with TNA that

should have a really good sense for this sort of thing, like Jerry Jarrett

and Mike Tenay. They need to say something when the idea is proposed for

Ron Harris vs. Amazing Red.

 

9) Create a sense of order. The shows consistently feel exceedingly

anarchic. It doesn’t seem as if anyone knows exactly what is going on, and

the show has a feeling of chaos. Obviously, this is to an extent a

conscious decision by TNA decision makers. The theory is chaos makes the

show feel exciting and unpredictable. The problem is that this isn’t the

right time or promotion for that sort of philosophy. So much has happened

in wrestling the past 5 years that a restoration of order is needed for any

promotion. This is particularly true for a new promotion, which needs to

teach the viewer the basic rules of the promotion before violating them. If

the rules are never established, the transgressions on those rules don’t

mean anything. A piledriver would mean a lot in promotions like Memphis or

later Smoky Mountain Wrestling solely because it had been banned. The shoot

interviews going back and forth don’t mean nearly as much in TNA because

they don’t fit into a broader context that the promotion has established.

Additionally, this “Crash TV” feel that TNA has taken in particular the

past few months is bad for the weekly PPV medium. It has better potential

on cable TV, where channel surfing viewers might be enticed to tune in. The

people who watch TNA have ordered the show already. Shocking TV doesn’t get

any new viewers. This lack of order is most clear in Mike Tenay. He has the

potential to bring respectability and credibility to a product, and to

convince the fans of what the promotion wants to get across, like a Gordon

Solie, Lance Russell or Jim Ross of years past. TNA instead has turned him

into an excitable, angry borderline maniac. When Mike Tenay is swearing and

yelling, there is no basic feeling of stability. Without stability, nothing

you do has much impact.

 

10) Get a regular TV show. I know, easier said than done. But this is the

only way to create a profitable company. The current system doesn’t build

up future matches very well at all. Thus, it is extremely hard to build

momentum. You get momentum in wrestling by taking the fans on a voyage

towards a particular match. TNA doesn’t have that direction. A TV show with

a monthly PPV would do that. It would force them to build up feuds over

time, rather than going week to week. Additionally, it is clear by this

point that TNA is never going to get a large audience through the weekly

PPV route. It needs to build an audience through free TV, and then get them

to buy PPVs. Put together a tape of TNA’s best stuff and sell it like crazy

to every cable network you can find. It’s going to be tough, but if TNA

works hard enough, it can get a prime time program somewhere on cable. WWE

is weak enough right now that if TNA is able to get a TV program and create

great television, it can grab some of WWE’s audience. I would try to go

head to head with Raw. Raw has been a consistently poor product, so if you

put on a good product, you can grab a good chunk of that audience and

create some enthusiasm about wrestling again. If you don’t put on a good

product, you would have died in a different time slot anyway, so you might

as well go all out. The problem with WWE is that they book week to week,

and the current format of NWA TNA encourages week to week booking. By

getting a TV show and doing less frequent PPVs, TNA can build up programs

and matches, and get a lot more people to order those PPVs. No wrestling

promotion in history has sustained itself on interviews and surprises. It’s

silly I have to even say this, but wrestling needs important wrestling

matches to succeed. TNA has yet to build up a match that feels truly

important, and a lot of that has to do with the current format. Wrestling

TV is best served to build up to a big card. Wrestling has always separated

the buildups of top feuds from the payoffs of top feuds. TNA is treading on

dangerous waters in trying to do both on the same show. Thus far, it hasn’t worked.

[Guest Coffey]

I quit reading half way through #1. That last thing that NWA needs to do is try to compete with the WWE. They don't need to be acknowledging the WWE during every show. That's a bad idea. Basically, it's free publicity, and shows that NWA knows they aren't as good as the WWE.

 

At least that's the way it comes off to me.

[Astro101 0]

I agree with some of the things he said, like more focus on the X division, more order in the show...but I also disagree with number 1 and dumping Vince Russo.

[Guest Raven_Effect01]

but I also disagree with dumping Vince Russo.

Why? You want to see David Flair, Athena, and one of the security guys that wrestled against Siaki in a Triple Threat X-Division title match wrestle again?

[Astro101 0]

Of course not.

 

But I like some of the things Russo has done, like the SEX angle and if you read bps's preview, how he's getting many guys over. Sure he's got some faults, I'm not saying he doesn't.

[Guest Slapnuts00]

I found it ironic that he feels they should emphasize that "the owner's daughter isn't all over the show". Think about how much screen time Stephanie occupies on Smackdown compared to Russo. It's gotta be like 10 minutes vs. over an hour...

[Guest j.o.b. squad]

yeah change the entire promotion and things will be fine

[Guest papacita]

I would try to go

head to head with Raw.

So take he'd take a virtually unknown wrestling promotion and put it head to head against arguably the most well known wrestling show in history.

 

Glad he's not running my company.

[Guest The Son of Sting]

I think they should name the ppvs's at the end of each month or every other month and treat it more like you would a ppv than a tv show.

[Guest The Shocker]

but differentating between one paid program and another is kind of stupid...

 

not much...but a little bit......they pay the same amount of money for a "blowoff" show when they don't really need blowoff shows...at least not yet...

 

When they can get a true TV deal, then they can start with that .... but until then it would seem kind of strange for any announcer to be hyping next weeks show as a "special" show when it's pretty much just like the rest