WWE: Shawn Michaels Comments on Being Hopeful NXT & TNA Partnership is “Long Standing”, Mr. McMahon Premiere Week Viewership on Netflix, More News

Shawn Michaels Comments on Being Hopeful NXT & TNA Partnership is “Long Standing” & Not Having Any Rush for a New Worlds Collide Event

A recent episode of The Ringer Wrestling Show podcast featured WWE SVP of NXT & Talent Relations Shawn Michaels as the guest. One of the topics discussed included Michaels thoughts about him being hopeful that NXT’s talent crossover partnership is a long standing one and not being in any rush to hold a new Worlds Collide event with TNA.

“Well look, I think obviously those things are possible (big blow off match or Worlds Collide event with TNA) but I will say, I look at this and hope that it is a long-standing relationship. In my personal opinion, I feel sometimes that if you go to those types of things too soon, oh, now you’ve gone through it and where do you go from there? So, right now, we’re enjoying this partnership. I think we’re enjoying very different matchups than we thought we’d be able to see here, in just a short amount of time. So, obviously excited about the future, excited about that relationship. I will say nothing’s ever off the table here in the WWE. Certainly in NXT. But I think, you know, we wanna go slower as opposed to faster.”

Transcript h/t: PostWrestling.com

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Mr. McMahon Premiere Week Viewership on Netflix

Netflix recently revealed that Mr. McMahon docuseries on Netflix was the fourth most watched show on the service for the week of September 23-29.

The docuseries was listed with a viewership of around 4,900,000 views for the past week and drew around 28,200,000 total hours viewed.

This was only behind “The Perfect Couple: Limited Series” which drew around 6,000,000 views, “Nobody Wants This: Season 1” which drew around 10,300,000 views, and “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” which drew around 19,500,000 views.

This docuseries premiered on Netflix on September 25th.

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WWE News & Notes

Wednesday’s WWE Speed show on Twitter featured IYO SKY defeating Naomi in a Semifinal round match for the inaugural WWE Speed Women’s Championship tournament. SKY will be facing off against the winner of the Kairi Sane/Candice LeRae match in the Finals of the tournament.

Prior to the start of Tuesday’s NXT premiere show on The CW in Rosemont, Illinois, CM Punk teased on Twitter that he had a big surprise for those who attended the event. Following the show, Punk revealed to the live crowd that this big surprise was free pizza from Lou Malnati’s Pizzeria that was handed out to fans as they left the venue.

Tuesday’s NXT premiere show on The CW in Rosemont was also notable for its censorship of the crowd’s audio whenever they chanted “holy shit” after big spots. This censorship was in the form of lengthy muting of the show’s audio whenever that situation took place throughout the show. PWInsider’s Mike Johnson reported that the censorship was from The CW’s end and not WWE and the reason was due to The CW was not going to risk any issue with the FCC over language due to their status as a network cable station.

As noted before, the initial viewership and ratings numbers for this past Monday’s WWE RAW show were revealed to be incorrect and off by almost 250,000 viewers following the correct updated numbers being released afterwards. The Wrestling Observer’s Dave Meltzer reported that the reason for the incorrect initial numbers was due to it had only contained the live viewership numbers and did not include DVR viewership until 3AM EST. This reportedly caused the numbers to be lower than would have been had tracked correctly for television shows.

Fightful Select’s Sean Ross Sapp reported that his sources stated that WWE officials have become aware of the lack of representation for black male wrestlers on their PLE/PPV events over the past two years. Those spoken to stated that this was not something that was being done on purpose by WWE nor was it something that WWE officials were aware had become a problem until recently due to complaints on social media. This controversy originated after a person recently posted a tweet about how it had been 791 days since a black male wrestler had a singles match on a WWE PLE/PPV event meaning that WWE CCO Paul “Triple H” Levesque has never managed to book a black male singles wrestler to win a match on a PPV event since he took over WWE creative.

Besides issues with the lack of representation for black male wrestlers on WWE PLEs, Raj Dhesi, former Jinder Mahal in WWE, recently responded on Twitter to Fightful Select’s report about his issues with teh lack of representation of signed South Asian and Indian talents in WWE. Dhesi stated “There is only one South Asian currently in WWE (@SunnyDhinsa). With over 2 Billion population, 1/4 people in the world are South Asian. Not a single talent in NXT/Performance Center. This is an issue.” In a follow-up deleted tweet, Dhesi stated “2021 WWE had 10 talents signed vs 1 in 2024. Btw this event was watched by over 20 Million people.“

As noted before, WWE recently took down their stage setup at their Performance Center in Orlando, Florida that had been used for their NXT shows since the NXT 2.0 era. In a recent The Hall of Fame with Booker T & Brand Gilmore podcast, NXT commentator and co-host Booker T confirmed that WWE crews had taken down the stage setup and are currently creative a new stage for NXT’s return to the Performance Center on October 15th. Booker T stated “I was reading today that we’re going to be out of the PC for a couple weeks now, actually three weeks before we get back in there. I heard that they have just totally tore it down, I heard a construction crew came in and totally just took everything out. So when we get back in there, it’s supposed to look totally off the chain, totally different. I’m excited. I want to see exactly what they’re doing.” (Transcript h/t: Fightful.com)

Netflix’s recently released Mr. McMahon docuseries featured a variety of topics discussed based on former WWE and TKO Group Executive Chairman Vince McMahon and WWE. One of the topics discussed included McMahon’s thoughts about WWE’s name change from World Wrestling Federation in May of 2002 due to a lawsuit filed by the World Wildlife Fund in 2000 over ownership of the “WWF” name. McMahon stated “When this lawsuit was filed, we tried to fight it, as we do most lawsuits. It looked like, ‘Wait. We’re not gonna win this thing.’ They had, in fact, used the initials WWF long before we did. So it changed from WWF to WWE because we were entertainment. It wasn’t necessarily a good thing that we had to change our name. I didn’t want to change, but you can’t do anything about it. Once something is closed, you have to move on. Whenever there is a failure, and there’ve been a lot of failures in my life, if you allow it to fester like, ‘I wish that would have worked. If I’d have done this, that would’ve worked.’ It’ll drive you nuts. Let it freaking go and think about something positive and work at something positive, not anything that’s negative.” (Transcript h/t: Fightful.com)

In a recent interview with the HUGE POP! with Donnie DaSilva and Jimmy Korderas podcast, former WWE and current TNA Wrestling talent Eric Young gave his thoughts about if he is interested in a potential return to WWE. Young stated “I even said this when I was 17: ‘I’m not gonna do this if it hurts me. I’m not gonna do it if I don’t like it.’ If I go to Spartanburg on Friday and I don’t have fun, I’ll quit and fly home on Saturday morning. 100 percent… And it’s not lost on me that I have that choice. I’ve walked away from a whole pile of money in the WWE. I could work there, I think, right now if I felt like it. But I am where I am and I’m enjoying what I’m doing. So I’m gonna do that and the minute that I don’t like it or it hurts me or it’s hard to do or I feel I need to be pulled through, I’ll quit, because I love it and respect it too much and the truth is-is a lot of it, it gets irritating. Flying on planes and living out of a suitcase and away from your home. The only part that I fully really enjoy is the creative process and actually doing it. Unfortunately, that’s only 10-to-20 minutes of my day. I think it was Christian said, ‘They’re not paying me to wrestle. I’d do it for free. They’re paying me to live out of a suitcase, live in a hotel, crammed in a car for 300 miles, sitting in economy 24F beside the bathroom on overseas flights. That’s what they’re paying me for. The other stuff I do for free.’ As long as I can do it at a high-level and I don’t think, I know I can still do it at a high-level, I will continue to do it. That could end this weekend and I’d be fine with that. But, as long as I can do it at a high-level and I can, I will continue to do it.” (Transcript h/t: PostWrestling.com)