The latest episode of former WCW President Eric Bischoff’s podcast Bischoff on Wrestling was released yesterday afternoon! A brand new episode will be released next Wednesday.
You can find some of Eric’s comments from the latest episode transcribed below.
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On whether there are comparisons that can be made between sports entertainment and reality television:
EB: I definitely can see it when it comes to the actual production of the show. I haven’t seen a WWE format in a long time but I know when I was there and I was working with those formats they were not scripted in the professional sense of the term “scripted”. They were still, even tho they were much more detailed than I used when I was running WCW, it essentially was the same thing. Your segments were timed out. You knew who was going to be in the ring and you knew what the situation was going to be. You had a general sense of what the dialogue associated with that segment was going to be. There was no script that sounded something like, “Interior: Arena. Tight shot.” Describing the situation and then the dialogue in specific detail. In many ways with the physical production of the show I think there is a great deal of parallels to some non-scripted shows. Like I said a few minutes ago, some of them are more loosely controlled and are almost what’s considered in the business as a “Doc Follow” or “Documentary/Follow” type of format. That’s a different kind of format. That’s much less scripting, it’s much less controlled and it’s really more of a documentary than it is what people think of as a “reality show”. When you look at “Competition Elimination Formats” for example, well, that’s much more controlled. Wrestling probably follows along the lines of a lot of the competition elimination formats we see when it comes to the actual production of it.
This week’s episode of Bischoff on Wrestling features Eric and Nick chatting about a variety of topics for over an hour this week with no guest. Some of the topics of conversation include:
- What the process of pitching a TV show is like currently in the entertainment industry
- The differences between scripted and unscripted TV content
- What kind of shows TV executives are looking for right now
- Trump’s decision to launch missiles into Syria
- The current political climate in America
- Allegations of bullying in WWE
- Mick Foley’s upcoming hip replacement surgery
- More…
