Shawn Daivari On Why Fans Resent WWE 205 Live, What He Tells Brother Ariya About The Brand, More
As noted, former WWE superstars Shawn Daivari and Ken Anderson were guests on last Wednesday's episode of the Wrestling Inc. Podcast. In it, WrestlingINC.com owner Raj Giri asked Daivari for his thoughts on WWE 205 Live.
"They're not making it very diverse," said Daivari. "The whole program, like Ken said, it should be, you know, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, it's really not. It's three hours of the same thing."
"If it was three hours, if it was like Saturday Night Live, I'd watch Saturday Night Live. It's two hours. But it's not all slapstick, it's not all political comedy, it's different sh-t. RAW is all the same and now 205 Live, the Cruiserweight Tournament they did that summer was different but now it's just another brand, it's exactly the same, so I don't know what makes it special."
Shawn's brother, Ariya Daivari, is currently signed to WWE where he performs on 205 Live and RAW in the cruiserweight division. Shawn recalled telling his brother 205 Live is like when WWE tried to resurrect the ECW brand.
"I tell Ariya all the time, it's exactly what they did with ECW," Shawn recalled. "?If they just said, 'hey here's our new brand' it would have been fine but they said 'hey, here's that cruiserweight sh-t that you guys loved this summer' and then they don't give them any of that; people have more resentment towards it. You told us it's a cruiserweight show, it's not."
"It's just another group of WWE Superstars," said Daivari. "The same with ECW, I remember it was like when ECW came back on SyFy all they see is a WWE produced product where those two One Night Stands and they're f?-ing amazing. And then the first show came on and Sandman came out and beat up a f?-ing jobber in a f?-ing zombie outfit and I was like what the f—? If they called it anything but ECW it would have been fine but the fact they promoted it as ECW; the ECW fans were really upset. Same thing with the people that fell in love with that cruiserweight tournament. They tuned in and say this is nothing like awesome tournament. If you put that on the network it seems like it's a completely different product."
You can listen to last Wednesday's episode of the Wrestling Inc. Podcast embedded in the video above. Please be advised this was a wild R-rated version of the podcast and that some of the language used is NSFW. Archived episodes are available by clicking here.