Former WWE Writer Talks Problems With Roman Reigns, SmackDown Moving and More

Former Smackdown lead writer Alex Greenfield was a guest on Wrestling Informant Radio this past Sunday which is hosted by Gary Cantrell and Chris McManamy. The interview which ran for 70 minutes can be heard at the following link. Here are some of the highlights:

On problems with Reign’s character:

“I think the bitch you get from a lot of people is the promos. I feel like his promos are getting better. I worked a lot with Batista. Batista took a while to find his voice for longer promos, but when he found it especially on that feud with Cena he was gangbusters every night. I think Reigns is a young man finding his voice and i think he can get there. The problem i have is it feels like they know the goal but they don’t know how to get there. To me the problems with Reigns are story problems. I think the weakest match at SummerSlam was him and Randy and they are going to that again. Then it sounds like they are gonna segue to Rollins then Hunter. If anyone can get him there i feel like Hunter probably can. I want to see Reigns involved in a really compelling story and not so much it just feels like he’s randomly coming out. What really pisses me off that Ambrose was really angry about getting stabbed in the back by Rollins and it seems like up to this point that Reigns hasn’t given a sh*t. That betrayal should have stabbed him in the kidneys. Instead he just went off and seemed to have not cared.”

Smackdown possibly moving back to Thursdays:

“During my brief tortured reign as lead writer (of Smackdown) that we transitioned from Thursday to Friday. It hurt us audience wise, there’s no question at all. Friday night particularly for the audience demographic is really a tough spot for wrestling to be in because people in the 18-34 demographic tend to want to go out on a Friday night. I think it’s nothing but a good thing. It does lend some hopeful news to Spike TV moving TNA Impact to Wednesdays doesn’t it? It sounds like they were aware of that and if their idea was to get it out of the way of Smackdown i think that gives some hope that instead of just this extension running through the end of the year, maybe they are closer to a deal than everybody thought with Spike and i think that would be great.”

Trying to serve the minority audience:

“One of our explicit goals both under Dave Lagana and myself when we were running Smackdown was to fight for the minority audience which we felt were being under served. We had Rey, Booker, Mark Henry, Eddie & guys that we intentionally pushed to the top of the card. Bear in mind the brand split was pretty hard and fast at this point so we were very separate. We intentionally went after that market and Vince wholly and Stephanie especially wholly supported us in aggressively trying to make those viewers feel creatively satisfied and give them people they could root for and root against who looked like them which i think is an important thing.”

Other topics brought up were the whole Del Rio situation and if Alex had personally seen racism behind the scenes in the company with some examples, a look at SummerSlam, the Cena/Lesnar rematch at NOC, Ambrose’s potential, an interesting idea for Rollins/Lesnar & so much more covered in this interview.