Bleacher Report recently interviewed two of All Elite Wrestling’s Executive Vice Presidents The Young Bucks (Matt Jackson and Nick Jackson) on a number of topics including booking matches as an executive of the company while also being an active competitor at the exact same time, WWE fans feeling neglected and wanting to continue to produce episodes of “Being The Elite” and “Road To.”
The Young Bucks first spoke about booking matches as an executive of the company while also being an active competitor at the exact same time, similar to how Cody Rhodes and Kenny Omega are.
This is what The Young Bucks said:
“There’s a fine line, but when it’s all said and done, Tony is the last call to order.” “He has final say on everything. There have been two times now where Matt and I have actually said ‘OK, we want to lose tonight’ and it gets to Tony and he goes, ‘Nope, you guys are winning.’ We tried to dispute and we’ve failed both times. Of course, fans aren’t going to see that and will probably think I’m even lying by saying it, but it’s the truth.”
“I never even wanted to tell people I was an EVP and it just kind of got out.” “There are other EVPs who love that. They want to talk about it. That’s fine, but Nick and I have always been the type of people who say, ‘No, I’m always a wrestler first and I want people to think of me as a wrestler.’ We always just want to be one of the boys. It’s tricky territory. They are going to say, ‘Well, they’re booking it. Of course, they’re gonna go over.’ Then there’s the argument they are the popular act everyone wants to see so, of course, they should win.
“I don’t think we should overthink it. A big reason we did this was to shine a spotlight on talent that isn’t as well-known, and Nick and I are very unselfish in that way. We really want to get other people over. We don’t have to win every match. We’ve been losing most of our career, people don’t realize.” “We probably don’t have a winning record if you looked at it. It’s not that important to us, but we should keep ourselves to a point where we don’t look overly weak. It’s very, very tricky, and you know what? We are never going to be able to keep everybody happy.”
The Young Bucks then said that they believe despite WWE’s hours and hours of available TV and network content, the WWE Universe still feels neglected and they are not as satisfied as they used to be, which is where AEW comes in.
This is what The Young Bucks said:
“The [WWE fans] like they’re so neglected.” “The things that they want, they just don’t get. What we learned early on when we did our first show, All In, was we built this entire show and gave the fans the finishes they wanted, and they came out of that show feeling so good. Some of the things they expected, but we learned that it’s OK sometimes if they expect something and they want something, you just give it to them. It’s what a really good television show is. You build to this climax and you’re thinking in the back of your head, ‘Man, when they get to the season finale, they have to do it this way,’ and then just imagine actually doing that. Aesthetically, we have to look, we have to smell, we have to sound different. If you’re flipping through the channels on Wednesday night, you have to know within one second from looking at one frame of our show, ‘Oh, that’s AEW.’
The Young Bucks then talked about wanting to continue to produce episodes of “Being The Elite” and “Road To,” but its content and the way it is presented will show that it is a totally separate product and a PG-13 version of their weekly TV show.
This is what The Young Bucks said:
“We’re going to keep those things separate, and I kind of like that.” “I think BTE should live on YouTube. It can be the TV-MA version of our show. You can watch SCU do a PG-13 rant on the Turner program, and you can watch Frankie (Kazarian) drop 12 f-bombs on Being The Elite. As for the Road To program, I would love it if we kept a lot of that stuff and put it on the television show because that’s a great way to develop characters and tell their stories. I think our television show will look like a lot of the stuff on Road To.”
