Eric Bischoff On What Vince Russo Doesn’t Understand About The TV Business

Eric Bischoff recently spent some time talking about Vince Russo on an episode of his 83 Weeks podcast. Bischoff and Russo worked together in both WCW and TNA but Bischoff feels that Russo didn’t understand much about the television business.

“You could have given Vince Russo 6 years and it wouldn’t have mattered,” Bischoff said on the show. “Look, you gotta have an idea, you gotta understand the wrestling audience. You can’t go out and live your pre-pubescent fantasies inside of a wrestling ring and think the mass audience is going to enjoy it.”

“Television is about ratings, you touched on it,” Bischoff continued. “If you don’t have ratings, you are not selling advertising. You can have ratings and still not be able to sell advertising. Advertising and ratings go hand-in-hand. If you are not delivering at least a reasonable audience that includes the demographic that advertisers are interested in, they are not going to buy your show, they are not going to spend money inside of your show.”

Bischoff continued to talk about how what Vince Russo was doing was not appealing to kids, families, and people who are not already big wrestling fans.

“Wrestling is a generational type of product,” he continued.

“If you look at Attitude Era wrestling and even some of the stuff we did on Nitro, that was not necessarily the type of content that a lot of families would feel comfortable with their kids watching. It was a little too adult.”

Bischoff continued to say that appealing to families gives the wrestling industry long-term success since it is passed down from generation to generation.

“A guy like Vince Russo would have blown his pre-pubescent wad if someone would have given him 6 months or a year and that would have been it. There would have been no more wrestling company.”

A clip of Bischoff discussing Vince Russo can be heard in the player below: