The PopCulteer
May 8, 2026
As longtime readers of PopCult may know, I am a fan of WWE, the largest professional wrestling company.
I also enjoy a lot of the smaller independents, like IWA East Coast and All Star Wrestling, locally.
The problem with being a fan of WWE is that, much of the time, they don’t make it easy.
Let me give you a little background on my fandom before I explain that last statement.
I am NOT a life-long fan of professional wrestling. As a kid, I would only occasionally watch Saturday Night Rasslin’ on WOAY TV if there was nothing else on at 11:30 PM on a Saturday night. I was not a big fan, and I didn’t realize that the one guy with the gruff voice would go on to become Macho Man Randy Savage.
In the early 80s, I caught a few moments of The Road Warriors, and thought they looked cool, but I couldn’t really get into the matches.
Professor Danger and Death Falcon Zero
When I was in college, my communications professor, the late and wonderful Danny Boyd, would often extoll the virtues of the craft to his classes. It was in one of his classes that I first learned what “blading” was. And thanks to Danny I knew who Dusty Rhodes was years before he starred in Danny’s film, Paradise Park.
Danny would go on to realize his dream of becoming a professional wrestler…at the age of 48.
When Hulk Hogan blew up big in the WWF (now WWE) back in the 80s…I hated that crap. To this day, when Hogan appears on my TV screen, I can’t change the channel fast enough. He just embodies every element about professional wrestling that I don’t like.
So I just didn’t pay any attention to wrestling when it was at its 1980s peak. When I worked at WVNS radio in 1988, and Frank George brought two big name wrestlers in to interview, I was introduced to them, but aside from knowing the name, “Jake The Snake,” I had no idea who they were.
The other guy seemed high or drunk or something. Later I learned that was Ric Flair.
So I got through much of my adult life gleefully ignorant of the world of professional wrestling.
Then, in the late 1990s, I was hired to write about action figures for Toy Trader Magazine. It was my job to keep up with the latest toy trends and to write, knowledgeably, about them. As such, in late 1998 it became apparent that action figures based on WWF and WCW wrestlers were huge in the collector’s market, and I needed to know more about them.
So I made a plan. Since their two flagship programs were scheduled head-to-head on Monday nights, one week I would watch WCW Nitro, and the next I would watch WWF RAW.
I tuned into Nitro…and it was absolutely awful. Unwatchably bad. It was worse than the 1980s wrestling that turned my stomach. This was a few months after WCW’s dominant run atop the ratings came to an end, and it was pretty obvious to me that the company was in trouble. The show was so bad I considered skipping the episode of RAW that I planned to watch the next week.
I’m glad I didn’t. I tuned in to watch RAW, and it was compelling, fun, the stories were easy to follow, and…that was the week that Mick Foley, as Mankind, won the Heavyweight title.
I was hooked. I was drawn to the misfit characters like Foley and Al Snow and Goldust (whose action figure I’d written about a year earlier, having only seen him on Conan O’Brien’s show). I really got a kick out of the off-the-wall, absurd, reality-challenged wrestlers. I still do.
But the less-weird characters appealed to me too. I got a genuine kick out of Stone Cold Steve Austin, The Rock, Big Bossman and others.
And I saw, finally, what the appeal was. This was soap opera for men. It was some kind of combat sport married with Kabuki theater. While the athleticism was very real, the outcomes were scripted for the maximum dramatic impact. It was basically The Guiding Light with punching.
How could you not like that?
I became an avid fan, but I noticed quickly that my favorite wrestlers, aside from Foley, never really got the starring role in the matches. In fact, a lot of them would get released from their contracts or were shuffled off to “jobber” status.
But I was prepared for that. The reason I mentioned Guidling Light was because I started watching it in the late 1970s, and while I liked it, I noticed that as soon as I really became interested in a character or storyline, they’d shift gears and go in a totally different direction that I was not enthusiastic about.
It’s like every time the show got really good, they’d scrap the storylines I liked and bring back Josh and Reva. I later learned that they periodically fired their producers or head writers, so the new person would just wrap up what was happening and move on to something different. I got used to having the rug yanked out from under me.
That built-in expectation of disappointment carried over from the serial entertainment of a soap opera to the serial entertainment of the WWF (and WWE).
And that is why I feel that it’s often hard to be a fan of WWE. As soon as I find a wrestler I enjoy watching, a corporate edict comes down to cut costs, and they get released.
Image from Wrestletalk
Just a week or two ago, right after another record-setting Wrestlemania and the announcement that their top three corporate execs were being paid tens of millions of dollars, WWE released almost thirty performers…and that list included several of my current favorites, The Wyatt Sicks, Aliester Black, Zelina Vega, Andre Chase, The New Day…it’s quite a list.
And it really sucks because they cut that many people right after Brock Lesnar, who was getting paid more than half of those folks combined, retired, taking his salary off the books.
WWE does this on a regular basis. Every time they do a mass release, I can count on them to cut loose a good number of the people I really enjoy watching. This is typical of the cancerous behavior of modern corporate America, where everything must be sacrificed to maximize shareholder value…especially the quality of the product. It’s typical of every major business in the world, and it’s a huge part of why “enshittification” is now a word used regularly in The New York Times.
The company ties to a certain offensive world leader don’t help, either.
Most of the released wrestlers go on to work for other companies, and I love to see them doing well, but I already devote way too much time each week to watching wrestling on TV. I can’t follow every wrestler I like everywhere they go.
As I type this, I can hear a large chorus of you folks asking, almost chanting, “Why don’t you watch WWE’s top competitor, AEW?”
I’ve tried. I really tried. I don’t like it.
I can’t really explain why I prefer WWE (and NXT) to AEW. It’s some sort of intangible that I don’t want to think hard enough about to figure out. I don’t watch wrestling to exercise my brain. It shouldn’t be work.
I can’t tell you why, but AEW bores me. The production values aren’t near WWE. The storylines don’t grab me. Even the wrestlers whose work I enjoyed in WWE don’t hold my attention in AEW.
I don’t know why. Maybe after more than 25 years of watching I’ve been programmed to like the WWE style. I can’t figure it out. Maybe WWE is “comfort food” and I’d rather gorge myself on that instead of feasting on the leafy green salad that is AEW. They just aren’t what I like about wrestling. I don’t say they aren’t good. It’s just not my cup of wrestling tea.
I don’t hate AEW. I am thrilled that they exist and I don’t buy into any of the moronic tribalism you see on the internet. Since they came on the scene, WWE has improved dramatically. Their storylines are better. The wrestling has been cranked up another notch. The competition has definitely spurred WWE to improve their product.
Which they needed, badly. Once Vince McMahon won the Monday Night Wars and bought and shut down WCW, he basically took a twenty-year victory lap and the shows got more and more creatively bankrupt as their ratings and my interest diminished severely. There were times when I’d skip watching the shows for months at a time and just keep up with the recaps on the internet.
Now, largely due to McMahon’s forced retirement and AEW’s more-than-moderate success, WWE is fun to watch again.
And it’s much better for the talent, who have a viable alternative that pays a comparable wage. WWE can’t lowball people anymore, at least not as badly as they used to.
Still, it’s very hard to enjoy WWE when they are dumping talent from what should be iron-clad contracts, just to manipulate the stock price and put a few million dollars more into the pockets of the guys who don’t actually do any of the wrestling or creative work.
It’s like really enjoying eating at a national chain restaurant when you know the local establishments could really use the business. It’s a clash of taste vs. morality.
You can’t really be a fan of WWE unless you accept that you are making a moral compromise by supporting a company that does not treat their talent in an ethical manner. My only defense is that the same is true for practically every bit of mainstream entertainment that’s controlled by a corporation. Movies, music, comic books, literature…it’s always the creators and artists who get screwed financially.
It’s all perfectly legal, but that doesn’t make it morally right.
This doesn’t change the fact that, while we’re out of town this weekend, I’m still going to watch and enjoy WWE Backlash.
I mean, yeah, the execs are sorta evil, but Danhausen is going to wrestle, and he’s both very evil AND very nice.
So there’s that, at least.
And that is this week’s PopCulteer. Check back for fresh content every day, including all our regular features.
This weekend sees both Mother’s Day and Charleston’s annual East End Yard Sale, and even with those activities crowding out the number of performances we usually have, there is still some cool STUFF TO DO all over and just beyond the borders of the state, to tell you about, noted as briefly as possible. We’re going to have a short list again this week because your humble blogger is juggling routine medical tests with a much-needed mini-vacation.
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