Column by Angel Aramboles, adapted from his video on the WrestlingNews.co YouTube channel. The full video is at the bottom of this article.
Shawn Michaels is expected to take over one of the most powerful creative jobs in WWE, and the timing gives WWE a chance to change more than its storylines. It is a chance to change how Raw, SmackDown and NXT are structured, written and produced.
PWInsider’s Mike Johnson reported that, according to multiple sources, the plan is for Michaels to step into Bruce Prichard’s role when Prichard retires from it after WrestleMania 43, which takes place April 10 and 11, 2027, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. WWE is promoting from within, the succession plan has been in place for some time, and Michaels will begin preparing for the job in the coming months. We covered the report here. WWE has not announced the change.
Michaels currently runs NXT as Senior Vice President of Talent Development and Creative. Prichard, WWE’s Executive Director of Creative Writing & Talent, is expected to stay on as a consultant, working from his home in Texas instead of near WWE’s headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut.
Prichard is also set to have neck surgery. Conrad Thompson said on 83 Weeks that the injury goes back to 1991, when the Ultimate Warrior attacked Prichard’s Brother Love character at a WWF Superstars taping, as reported by Fightful. That angle was used to write Brother Love off TV as Prichard was leaving the company, the first of several exits and returns over the years. His last return to the creative team full time was in February 2019. We wish Bruce Prichard a full recovery.
What the job is
Paul “Triple H” Levesque is WWE’s Chief Content Officer and the head of creative. Prichard works directly under him, and the writing teams for Raw and SmackDown, along with NXT’s writers, fall under Prichard, per PWInsider’s earlier report. Prichard has also run the shows when Triple H isn’t there, according to Fightful Select.
That is the job Michaels is expected to step into: essentially the number two person in creative behind Triple H. It also means Michaels would be on the road with the main roster much more than he is now.
Michaels’ NXT has produced a lot of the current main roster. Trick Williams got a shot at Sami Zayn’s Undisputed WWE Championship on the October 30 SmackDown. Oba Femi beat Brock Lesnar on Night 2 of WrestleMania 42. Bron Breakker, Je’Von Evans and Carmelo Hayes all came through NXT as well. Fan reaction online to the report has been mostly positive for that reason.
Analysis: The talent isn’t the problem
WWE has plenty of talent. What needs an overhaul is the way the shows are structured and written.
Watch WWE TV right now and it is attacks, stunts and run-ins all the time: backstage attacks, post-match attacks, run-ins and backstage skits. It happens so often that fans are numb to it, and a lot of fans online say the booking feels like everything has been done before.
Tiffany Stratton is an example. On the October 23 SmackDown, after Chelsea Green retained the WWE Women’s Championship against Roxanne Perez, Liv Morgan, Perez and Raquel Rodriguez attacked. Stratton made the save and nearly cashed in her Money in the Bank contract on Morgan, the Women’s World Champion, before Judgment Day pulled Morgan to safety. Three days later on Raw, after Becky Lynch beat Morgan by disqualification, Stratton hit a moonsault on Morgan and went to cash in again. This time Dominik Mysterio pulled Morgan out.
The first time Stratton held the briefcase, she tried to cash in at SummerSlam 2024 and Bayley knocked her off the apron, teased it again at Bad Blood, and tried to cash in on Morgan on Raw in October 2024, when Dominik Mysterio pulled Morgan out. She finally cashed in on Nia Jax on SmackDown in January 2025. The same spot is being run again two years later with small changes, and people notice.
Some will say NXT is booked the same way, and Michaels runs NXT. That’s true; NXT is a frantic show where something is happening all the time. But that may not be all Michaels. NXT is on The CW, Raw is on Netflix, SmackDown is on USA Network and the premium live events are on ESPN. There may be pressure from TV partners to keep people tuned in minute by minute on all three shows. If that is the reason, this is a chance to try something different, because wrestling didn’t always look like this.
Analysis: How WWE used to build to the big shows
At the 1995 Royal Rumble, Bam Bam Bigelow lost a tag team title match, then shoved NFL legend Lawrence Taylor, who was sitting at ringside. Taylor and his group played it straight. The next night on Raw, Vince McMahon apologized to Taylor and suspended Bigelow, and the company treated it as a serious incident.
They built from there over weeks. Bigelow’s apology was cut off by a “technical failure.” A statement from Taylor’s agent was read on Raw. Bigelow returned and called Taylor a coward. Taylor spoke by satellite and Bigelow interrupted. They were not in the same room until the WrestleMania press conference, and the only physical moment in the build was a brawl between Steve McMichael, from Taylor’s side, and Kama, from Bigelow’s Million Dollar Corporation. Bigelow and Taylor were kept apart, and they main-evented WrestleMania XI. If they had been in the ring cutting promos and attacking each other backstage every week, the match would have meant a lot less.
That wasn’t the only one. Hulk Hogan and Randy Savage teamed as the Mega Powers, and the tension over Miss Elizabeth was teased in small moments for months before Savage finally turned on Hogan on The Main Event on NBC on February 3, 1989. The build to WrestleMania V was mostly interviews.
In 1992, Sid Justice eliminated Hogan at the Royal Rumble while they were still teaming. On Saturday Night’s Main Event on February 8, 1992, Sid refused to make the tag and walked away. He didn’t attack Hogan. That set up their match at WrestleMania VIII. The Ric Flair and Savage feud on that same card was built on Flair’s claims about Elizabeth and the doctored photos he showed, not weekly brawls.
In 1993, Crush was taken out by Yokozuna and off TV for months. When he came back, he turned on his friend Savage on Raw on October 18, 1993, and Savage beat him in a Falls Count Anywhere match at WrestleMania X.
You don’t have to go back 30 years to see this work. Triple H’s NXT a decade ago was a TV show built to promote the TakeOver specials. The weekly shows were mostly matches, and the big moments were saved for TakeOver, where most finishes were clean. Bobby Roode beat Andrade “Cien” Almas at TakeOver: Brooklyn II in August 2016, beat Tye Dillinger at TakeOver: Toronto that November, and beat Shinsuke Nakamura for the NXT Championship at TakeOver: San Antonio in January 2017. Drew McIntyre was then built up to take the title from him at TakeOver: Brooklyn III. It was about winning and the championship. To be fair, NXT wasn’t on network TV then and didn’t face the pressures it has now.
Analysis: The numbers
The goal is to get more people watching week to week, because TV money drives the company.
In 2024, Raw’s last full year on USA Network, it averaged 1.22 million households, per Wrestlenomics. In 1995, the year many fans point to as the low point of the WWF, Raw averaged a 2.38 cable rating on USA, according to the Wrestling Observer. With USA’s reach at the time, that works out to roughly 1.6 million homes, more than in 2024. Raw is now on Netflix, which only releases global numbers: the October 12 episode drew about 2.5 million views worldwide over seven days.
SmackDown on October 23 drew 1.1 million viewers, down 17% from the week before and the lowest of the month, according to Wrestlenomics. To be fair, SmackDown is up from a year ago: its October average of 1.257 million is up 18% from October 2025. But SmackDown’s first episode on USA, in January 2016, drew about 2.76 million viewers.
Streaming and other options are a factor. But the NFL, MLB and NBA still draw big audiences when people are invested in what they’re watching. Present a show so people feel they need to see next week’s episode, and they will watch.
Attendance is up. WWE averaged an estimated 7,900 tickets per event in 2023, the most since 2002, according to Wrestlenomics. But WWE is also running far fewer shows: 384 events in 2017, and TKO President Mark Shapiro said in 2024 that WWE was dropping its “low-margin, marginally profitable events” and would run close to 200 events the following year. The shows WWE does run are mostly in big cities and overseas. Live events are also easier to promote now through social media, but buying a ticket when WWE comes to town doesn’t mean watching every week.
In fiscal 1996, the WWF averaged about 3,800 tickets per event. But the WWF didn’t have today’s TV money then, so it ran smaller buildings and taped TV in the Northeast to keep costs down. Average attendance peaked at about 12,100 per event in fiscal 2000, during the Attitude Era.
Some will say the Attitude Era is the answer. The Attitude Era was a response to WCW. When Monday Nitro launched in 1995, it was live every week and looked like nothing else on TV, and Nitro beat Raw in the ratings for 83 straight weeks. WWE answered with car crashes, stunts and adult themes, and it worked at the time. It was a boom period. But after the boom, TV viewership declined year after year to where it is now.
Meanwhile, revenue keeps going up. WWE’s revenue in the second quarter of 2026 was $620.9 million, up 12%, driven mostly by media rights, including the ESPN deal that began in September 2025. WWE is always working toward its next TV deal, and more weekly viewers means more leverage.
Analysis: What I’d like to see
I’d like to see WWE revamp the product from start to finish: the production, the way it looks and the way it feels. Right now it feels like a TV show that happens to have a wrestling ring in it. It looks overproduced. I’d like it presented more like a sport.
That doesn’t mean no storylines. It means spacing things out so a storyline moment has impact. Tell stories the slow-burn way, like Bigelow and Taylor or Crush and Savage, where the two people don’t have to be in the same room every week. Or the way Triple H’s NXT built Bobby Roode: win, win again, win the title. The stars need to win matches on TV.
- Not every segment needs an attack.
- Backstage segments should be rare, and when they happen, make them interviews, not skits.
- Cut back on referees getting attacked with no consequences, and cut back on the stunts.
- Attack angles are good when they’re done sparingly, so people get invested when they happen.
Sponsors are part of the business, and that’s fine. Boxing and UFC have them too. But there are other ways to make the show feel less plastic.
There’s also the NXT side. If Michaels moves up and goes on the road, someone has to pick up more of the NXT work. AJ Styles, who retired at the 2026 Royal Rumble and was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame, now does producer work for NXT and Evolve. He is well respected in the locker room, and it will be interesting to see whether he takes on more there.
Not everyone thinks much will change. Triple H is still the head of creative, and Michaels would be working under him, not replacing him. That’s a fair point. But Paul Heyman has described Triple H as “by far, the most collaborative” chief content officer he has worked with, compared with Vince McMahon’s “quite the micromanaged creative process.” Fans have expected big creative changes before that never came, often because McMahon stepped in and wouldn’t let things breathe. He isn’t there to do that anymore.
Some will point out that business is up and that a lot of fans watch on YouTube, Netflix and social media. But a two-second view on YouTube is not worth what a two-hour viewer on USA Network or Netflix is worth to advertisers and TV partners.
There’s a chance for WWE to revamp the product, and this is the time to do it.
Should WWE slow things down and save the big moments, and is Shawn Michaels the right person to make that change?
