Eric Bischoff looks back at the 83 weeks in which WCW beat the WWF in the ratings on his podcast 83 Weeks with Eric Bischoff, and on the most recent episode, amidst talk of the Monday Night Wars, he gave some takes on the ongoing Wednesday night one between WWE NXT and All Elite Wrestling.
Bischoff, who was recently fired by WWE after briefly returning to the company after a stint as Executive Director of Smackdown, shared what he told Vince McMahon when he asked him what he thought of Dynamite. In Bischoff’s words:
I was pretty honest with him. I thought the action was good, but I thought what made that show really stand out to me was how engaged the audience is. I mean, the audience to me made their show so much better than the NXT show.
Not that there is anything wrong with the NXT show – the action in the ring was great, the characters were great, there’s a lot of great things about it – but when you put a live event inside a small confined studio, kind of like TNA, I don’t care how great the action is, it just doesn’t have that big event feel to it. You don’t get the energy you get from the audience. That energy in the arena that we see on the screen translates to the viewer, and when you don’t have that energy, no matter how great the stuff is in the ring, it just feels less than.
Bischoff also said he hasn’t talked to anyone from AEW, but from watching Dynamite, he thinks they’ll do “extremely well,” though he’ll be interested to see how they’re doing in three months when they no longer have “that new car smell.”
