Anyone that has listened to me for the past year on The RELM Network and now on PodcastOne understands how I feel about characters in professional wrestling. In my opinion, wrestling will always be […]
Anyone that has listened to me for the past year on The RELM Network and now on PodcastOne understands how I feel about characters in professional wrestling. In my opinion, wrestling will always be more successful when the audience cares about the people that are in the ring.
One of the reasons that the casual television audience is failing to connect with WWE’s Sami Zayn is because nobody knows anything about him. He’s just some guy that wrestles matches. Go through your mind and think of the most successful wrestlers in the history of the business and I promise you that every single one of them were unique, had a personality, and were a spectacle to see in person and on television. They stood out in a crowd. The business has moved away from this philosophy, and it’s no coincidence that customers are being lost every single year.
TNA is at least getting it right with one wrestler: RoseMary. I doubt that anyone is changing the channel when she is on the screen. I know they have a lot of story that needs to be told about the character, but as far as look goes, she’s what wrestling needs. She looks different. She has a gimmick. People will remember her after watching Impact. Personally, I’ve had a hard time finding anything to write about concerning any wrestling television program lately, but I just paused Impact to sit down and write this piece.
I’m impressed with the effort put into the RoseMary presentation, including her performance. All we need now is some more backstory and more defined character traits, which I hope will come with time.
A lot of people involved in wrestling think that every character needs to be a tough guy/girl badass wrestler. Well, that’s not what the business is about. It’s drama, it’s story, it’s entertainment. That’s where TNA is getting it right with RoseMary. Where TNA got it wrong, in my opinion, is the de-evolution of Jade. She had a very distinguishable character and attire when she was a loony in The Dollhouse. Now, they have stripped that all away and she’s just another “tough wrestler.” Instead of being unique, her character is now run-of-the-mill. People watch MMA for tough fighters, not professional wrestling. They used to watch wrestling for characters and story, but take that away, and you take away the audience as well.
I hope TNA, and the industry in general, starts to give us more RoseMarys and stops killing great gimmicks like Jade. The first step into building back your television audience is to give people characters to care about.
Follow Jeff on Twitter: @JeffLane22
Vince Russo's The Brand 
Awesome article Jeff!
I’ve been a fan of wrestling since before the attitude era and one of the reasons I became a fan was because of the characters.
Kane, Undertaker, Mankind, HBK, DX, The Rock and Stone Cold…when you think of those names you think amazing CHARACTERS!
Yes, some of them may have been playing themselves but with the “volume turned up” but they were at least portraying a character on screen. Nowadays we have wrestlers who wrestle using their own names and not even trying to play a character. Why should we care about Apollo Crews? And Sami Zayn, who is he? Where did Gallows & Anderson come from? What is there STORY?!
Until they give us a reason to suspend reality or emmurse ourselves into a character, like a successful TV show, then we are going to see the same old thing, week in and week out, which is 2 people fighting (tumbling) for an unknown reason!
Take care & keep up the great work mate,
NGB
100% with you mate!
I miss those larger than life characters, how can they tell us they are trying to be more “realistic” in one breath then get dropped on your head followed by 10 clean kicks to the face and a chair shot then jump back up like nothing is wrong..
We all know it’s “scripted” but we all know superman or batman is scripted too but we love the craziness of the characters..
Either be “realistic” on every sense of the word or bring back larger than life characters with a bit of charisma and a cool back story and let us get immersed in them like we do when we play a video game or watch a movie.
I couldn’t agree more. I’ve been a fan since the early 1980’s when they all had the over the top characters. Imagine if the Missing Link walked onto the scene today. Wrestling desperately needs more over the top characters in 2016.