Triple H Talks NXT's Advantage Over The WWE Main Roster With Storylines
WWE's COO and the fourteen-time World Champion, Triple H, took some time to speak with Josiah Williams for WWE's PC YouTube channel. During the interview, Hunter opened up about the creative process that happens in WWE NXT each week. He thinks it's a much easier task to create long-term storylines if you put out one-hour, weekly TV shows and a handful of pay-per-views each year as opposed to the mass amounts of content RAW and SmackDown have to produce every week.
"There's intention there to run long-term storylines and to keep those story arcs going when you can," Hunter explained. "But some of it is just how it ended up because we have the luxury of not having to write 3 hours of live television every week or get through multiple hours of [TV] with multiple pay-per-views in a short period of time. When you have a monthly pay-per-view and 3 hours of live TV every week, like you do with a RAW, that is an exponentially different way of writing that makes you have to go through stuff faster and burn through things. When you can do it on a much more one hour, a much slower pace and you can tell that story where you're not bombarded at all times, you can make that last a lot longer and draw it out over time."
Despite their goal to continue telling long-term stories, sometimes, unexpected occurrences happen that force the NXT team to restructure where the story will end up. This happened earlier his year when a need for immediate neck surgery cause Tomasso Ciampa to relinquish the NXT World Championship. Hunter believes that this can sometimes give you a better result that you ever initially intended.
"Some of those storylines are also things that – I find and I'm sure a lot of people do that write stuff like this – For us, things happen; injuries happen where you have to change your thinking on something," Hunter said. "You're in the middle of a storyline and Ciampa gets injured so you have to go a completely different way.
"But sometimes the genius comes out of that chaos, like where something happens and in the moment it happens you go, 'Oh my God, this has ruined everything about this.' So you make a left and it ends up being even better," Triple H continued, "Then when you come back to it, you go, 'Wow, that turned out even better than what we actually had laid out.' So sometimes that genius comes out of it; sometimes that genius moment isn't something you intend on but it kind of fell in your lap, ya know?"
NXT will tape television tonight at Full Sail University. We'll have full coverage and results from the taping tonight. If you use any quotes from this article, please credit Wrestling Inc. for the transcription.