Triple H was recently interviewed by the Sporting News. During the interview, he spoke on a wide variety of topics.
One of these topics was about AEW and them becoming competition for NXT on Wednesday nights.
Here is what Triple H had to say about AEW:
It’s a funny thing. I don’t hear anybody going the Tuesday night sitcom wars are off the chart. It’s just a genre of entertainment in a way and to say there’s this war, first of all, for me, it comes down to putting on the best show and I’ve been saying this over and over. Since day one, we’ve been on Wednesdays on the network. Since day one, I have thought about trying to make each show better than the one before, trying to raise talent to another level, trying to make this product the best product it can be while embracing its difference from “RAW” and from “SmackDown” and everything else that’s out there.
We have the opportunity five years, in or whatever it is, to stay in our time slot, go to the No. 1 cable channel on television and expand it so there’s more opportunity for everybody, but the goal is the same. It doesn’t matter to me if there’s another show on that night. It doesn’t matter to me if there’s somebody else in the space. I’m not concerned with that, especially not yet given the fact that so far, they’ve held four, five shows. And they’ve been great. But they’re one-off shows.
Fifty-two weeks a year, two hours live every week is a different animal. Totally different animal. So, until that’s started happening and happened for a while, because an immediate splash … People have asked me right now, we had tremendous success last week (the Wednesday, Sept. 18 edition) with the rating for NXT, over a million people watching. The rating was great. A 200 percent increase in the 18-34 demo. On every level. I’m happy with that, but to me, this is a marathon. It’s not a sprint.
When we got this opportunity on USA, it was an opportunity to stand at the starting line of a marathon. I’m interested in the long haul. I’m interested in what this company has done for 50 years, with that they’ve done for 30 (years) with “RAW, what they’ve done for 20 (years) with “SmackDown” which is what this company does better than anybody else on the planet: week in, week out, live sports entertainment and doing what we do. And it doesn’t matter what’s out there.
There’s competition that we’ve dealt with for years. You can look back and say a brief period with WCW, but the competition we’ve dealt with for years is the NFL, is Major League Baseball. It’s large scale sporting events. It’s political debates. It’s everything that is out there and that’s what we deal with. So, my goal is to put on the best show possible every single week and we’ll see what the future brings because right now, it’s just a bunch of speculation over two-week programming that hasn’t even started yet and there’s no track record of success long-term of a two-hour, weekly live event in any way, shape, or form.
Triple H was also asked if he was irked by Kenny Omega’s recent comments about NXT:
It doesn’t matter to me. I’m not sure if you’re aware of social media and that landscape. It’s a fairly negative place (laughs). If you’re going to get thin-skinned and read into stuff and get angry about stuff that people say, it’s gonna be a rough life.
There’s a statement about opinions over the years I’ve heard. Everybody it entitled to their opinion. Everybody is entitled to put an executive tag on the front of their name and think that’s a cool thing. Whatever. It’s all good. Bring your best show. If that’s how you want to look at it, bring your best show. I’ll bring my best show. We’re all good and the winners are the fans and they’ll choose what they want to watch and how. It doesn’t matter to me. It really doesn’t and it’s not my interest and my interest is the best show possible.
I’m going to take the talent roster that we have, I’m going to take the in-ring product that NXT has that I would put up against anything in the world, bar none, and I’m going to put on the best show possible every single week for two hours. My competition is everything else out, but the truth is for our fans, I just want to deliver the best product that I can to them. That’s as far as it goes.
Let me know what you think in the comment section below or on Twitter.
In other news, check out our Wrestlemania 38 predictions.
On a related note, check out a potential spoiler for AEW’s debut episode here.