by Jeb Tennyson Lund
OnlineOnslaught.com/CitizenScholar.net

As negative as I seem, I still try very hard to ascribe fault to my own inner problems or motives first. When something becomes tiring, I ask myself if my attitude toward it changed because I — and not it — changed. Thus I began searching myself when I blew off watching several weeks of Smackdown. I was thrilled that Eddie Guerrero was the champ. So why didn't I care enough to veg-out on the couch for two hours and watch him? What was my problem?

I really wanted to think it was all my fault, but after a week of kicking the idea around, I came to the conclusion that my attitude was natural. I was just burned out, and WWE television is structured in such a way as to induce burnout. It may not be a permanent case, but it seems that burnout's contraction is inevitable at some point. Sheer volume of programming beats the viewer into a degree of apathy. The ratio of quality inherent in every show levels expectations. Finally, the relentlessness of the spectacle grinds down even the most faithful viewer.


Volume
Even the most freewheeling college student has a limited schedule. Perhaps he needs to leave someone's bed before sunup, be drunk by lunchtime, and meet certain people at 4:20. But if you were to ask this deadbeat if he could devote six hours per week to one TV show, even he would probably beg off, claiming responsibilities.

This might seem silly, especially given that most of us watch several hours of TV per week. If you break it down, however, most of those hours are comprised of different programming satisfying unique interests. (Also, a lot of the extra hours are the result of getting sucked into a channel's line-up, not specific programs.) I might want to watch six hours of TV per week, but those hours are shared by two Law & Order episodes, Angel, the new Simpsons, Raw and maybe something else. I might watch several hours more, but that's owed to me being bored and clicking on The Daily Show or a rerun of a favorite show.

What I plan to watch is the catch. What WWE wants its fans to plan to watch is another. Ideally, they would have us watch six hours of WWE TV per week: two hours of Raw, two hours of Smackdown and two hours of the sub-level shows, if not more. Practically speaking, that's a lot of TV, because it gets added to the several hours of other programming we would like to plan to watch.

It's a lot on it's own, but it looks even bigger when you break down the numbers. Six hours of WWE per week is equal to 12 episodes of a sitcom. Most sitcoms run about 24-26 episodes per year, so that six hours is roughly equivalent to half a sitcom's season.

It may seem like a great idea to some to be able to watch half a sitcom's season in one week. But keep in mind that context makes that desirable. Simply put, a sitcom is structured in the context of having half a year of downtime to write scripts and film episodes. It's also seen in the context of lots of downtime. It's hard to grow annoyed with Scrubs when you go six days and 23.5 hours between episodes — and 26 weeks without new ones. Half a season in one week can make even the most three-dimensional characters irksome and the most dynamic storytelling enervating. Yet the WWE has few of the former and rarely bothers with the latter, thus making your viewing of those six hours seem like a determined slog though entertainment.

Six hours of WWE TV is also equal to about 1/4 of the season of an hour-long drama. One WWE week gives you as much content as a story-arc in The West Wing. The context is different here, too. Rarely if ever do dramas run six episodes in a row anymore. Their producers seem to enjoy taking a week or two off, here and there, to whet your appetite for the payoff to a story. Even though it's six hours of content, it can be stretched over eight or even ten weeks. Moreover, the spans between episodes (and reruns) allow viewers to reexamine characters' motives, speculate as to outcomes and generally enrich the viewing experience by thinking about it.

No matter how much we like watching wrestling, the striking volume of it available to us can seem like too much. There's almost no time to think about what's happened before some new condition alters our worries or theories. It can be too many hours, on too many days, giving too many obligations. It's too many nights when going out means missing something on TV, and staying in means missing something in the outside world. If you're a devoted fan of ER, you only need worry about being home on Thursday nights by nine or ten p.m. A devoted wrestling fan has two, three or four nights per week, all at varying times, to worry about. And no reruns.

Burnout can come into play because of indifference or rebellion. You may skip some WWE TV because you know that there are four or five other hours of it programmed during the rest of the week. Why sweat this one show? Or you may not watch because the ubiquity of it all annoys you: you hate feeling obligated to keep up with so much, so you skip a show, sneering at it with the knowledge that there's plenty more to see another time. Either way, the volume of what's available can keep you away, burned out by a neverending sense of newness or duty.


The Quality Ratio
Bad writing is like a goldfish: it grows as large as its outer boundaries allow. Take a small goldfish from his small bowl, toss him into a tank, and he'll get bigger. Similarly, take a college kid's eight-page essay, tell him that it needs to be 15 pages, and just watch the bullshit and unnecessary italicized Latin terms multiply like bacteria pumped full of steroids.

If we look at the constraints on the WWE writers, we must acknowledge that there is a limit to their good ideas. They must provide new content 50 weeks per year, with really no breaks, while managing stories for over 60 people and being careful not to repeat winning formulas too frequently. The responsibility they bear is onerous; and after dealing with wrestlers, other bookers, road agents, critics and the fans, their attitude must be murderous. I envy only their salaries.

Yet the lesson here is basically, "Give any one writer too much show, and he will hang himself." Or slack off. Take your pick. Like the college kid who has to meet a page requirement, the WWE writer has to meet six hours per week, and padding that time is necessary and unavoidable, given the enormity of the task.

If a college student only has five pages in which to make a convincing argument, that argument will be, on margin, substantially more concise and persuasive than if he has ten pages in which to wheedle and pontificate with the obnoxious certitude of youth. Similarly, a writer stuck planning a two-hour show will keep that show running at a snappy pace, afraid to miss his marks for more than a few minutes. A twenty-minute throwaway promo becomes 1/6th of a wasted show.

But those same minutes out of 360 per week are just 1/18th of a blot on the weekly record. In short, you can partially excuse those twenty, because there are still 340 surrounding them in the arena of wrestling programming. Finding flaw in them is like picking a suspect from an eighteen-person lineup, as opposed to a six-person lineup.

It's heartening that the aggregate of quality minutes on WWE TV is probably greater or — at the very least — equal to what it was when there was only one show per week. Yet that is also a problem. Now that there are two major shows (and one one-hour sub-show devoted to each of them), that aggregate of quality minutes is spread out over the week, sandwiched between boring segments, arranged without reason or predictability amongst so many inessentials. Six years ago, the quality minutes were all on one episode of Raw. Today, you might as well flip coins, read tea leaves and poke at entrails to figure out when watching WWE TV will be most rewarding. The best promo could be on one of two shows; the best match on one of four.

The number that means the most now is the quality ratio: the number of excellent minutes in relation to the higher number of mediocre or awful ones. I can't name that ratio, and I dare anyone else to seriously try. But it's an exceptional day when that ratio is low. It's cause for celebration when that ratio results in a whole number and not a terrible fraction.

Most of the time, for every one minute of excellence, there are probably four you can toss away: half an hour of must-see Raw, and 90 minutes of Lawler hooting, "Moments Ago" reminders that benefit only those with an iron spike driven into the portion of the brain that controls short-term memory, some ignorant fleshpot bending over to the surprise of no one, a squash match, an interview conducted by a semi-animate human-shaped fencepost and two minutes of Randy Orton defecating on the human spirit.

Likely none of this matters to the diehards. The rest of us, however, are subject to a disenchanting reality. That is: that we know we'll suffer tedium, irritation or no feeling at all three or four times as much as we will be entertained. I know that sounds severe, but consider this: aren't we all fairly satisfied when we can say that 30 minutes of Raw were good, and the rest was palatable or inoffensive? Isn't that pretty much par for the course, throughout the year?

This sort of one-in-four-minute ratio would be absolutely abysmal for practically any other show. The average sitcom is 22 minutes long. If only 5.5 were good and the rest either tolerable or bad, would we congratulate it as a "solid" episode? (There are sitcoms like this, and most of them are on CBS, geared to an audience incapable of registering anything other than a cardiac episode in response to satire.) As much as columnists are wont to poke at the hokiness and unintelligence of wrestling fans, we're still a pretty clever bunch. In spite of that, we accept a success-to-failure ratio for wrestling that we would balk at if it were applied to any other regular show.

We burn out at this point. Because we know — we know — that we'll be in luck if Raw or Smackdown have one full hour of really good material. Often, neither do. We never can tell when they will or won't. After a while, the doubt and irritability sinks in.

Say you're at a bar with a coworker, and he offers to buy another round. You look at your watch and realize that another round and the time for coffee and sobering up will make you miss the first hour of Smackdown. At that moment you simply say to yourself, "Fuck it." Fuck it. The first hour might suck, and the second might be better. Or the show might wholly suck. There are always recaps, and recap shows, and next week, and the week after next, and the week after that, and the week after that — all stretching into a shimmering hallucinatory wave off the horizon. It's the entertainment equivalent of driving toward L.A., on I-5, during the summer.

But the safest wager is that the show will have than damnable ratio. For every minute of wonder, there will be four of desultory acceptance. At a certain point, that ratio capitulates to the possibility of something else. Maybe it's the certainty that one more drink will see you and a buddy bonding and trading war stories. Or instead of driving home after dinner to catch Raw, you know you'll have more quality time walking around downtown with the girlfriend, poking your head in clubs or shops, or seeing what's showing at the movie theater. The ratio of goodness for a fake show, for a fake and passive part of your life, is no longer worth the basic rewards of real life.

At some point, the ratio exercises a perverse sort of mathematics. You don't see a proportion of good and bad. Rather, your expectations flatten. You level out, because the great moments erode with those three- or four-times greater moments of garbage or tolerability. Burnout is neither romantic nor devastating. It's a numerical compromise. The show isn't a one or a ten on a ranking scale. It's there, the middle of a road bereft of complexity. It's then that you forego the compromise between the rest of your life and watching wrestling, and finally just start doing anything else.


Relentlessness
And then there is the relentlessness, the unwavering thrum of both the volume of shows and their lamentable quality appearing before you again and again and again. Just as there is no off-season for wrestlers, there is none for fans. Think of the cruel irony of WWE sending the bone-weary to enliven the show-weary.

The relentlessness is not a phenomenon on its own. It's the rate of application of volume and quality — the constant by which they are multiplied. It's what magnifies distaste or weariness. Volume or quality of shows make only a small impact in and of themselves. That they never stop is what predicates reaction. This might seem like a plea for a wrestling off-season or for an end to the brand split, but those are columns for another day.

Surely few could think WWE's claim that wrestling is fresh and must-see 50 weeks per year is anything other than insulting or hubristic. The attempt to maintain this schedule seems born of habit rather than good sense. While serious dramas insert reruns into the first-run schedule, in order to give viewers a breather and a chance to think about the stories, WWE gives viewers no respite. It might be just as well that you're not offered a break in which to think more about WWE storylines, but it's still a lack of a break. People need time off from everything, even entertainment.

WWE thinks more is more. On top of having new programs for all but two weeks per year, you have six hours of programs per week. More then becomes less, because it becomes almost impossible for anyone to keep up. Quality can be lost, even on someone who's seen it and recognized it. The rote process of seeing one or more shows weekly, forever, inculcates a sense of humdrum routine. Like someone who's had a good day at work and doesn't recognize it because he's so used to having dull days, positive aspects of WWE shows can get lost amid the sense of dutifully watching yet again, just to watch.

With so much stimuli — both good and bad — loss becomes almost inevitable. I long ago gave up the ghost when it came to watching Heat and Velocity, relying on the fact that I could read recaps of the two one-hour shows in about twenty minutes. In spite of that, storylines were forgotten, by me and possibly the WWE writing staff. Even today, I couldn't give you a passable thumbnail sketch of the last six months of either show. Worse, if you asked me to name everyone on the WWE roster, I'd probably wind up 30 names short, forgetting even those who appear on Raw (pretty much the only show I never skip). I'd be sincerely surprised to meet any WWE fan who could name everyone who'd appeared on TV in one week.

Part of the relentlessness problem is that WWE maintains an atavistic counter-programming strategy, fighting a forgotten fight and losing one they've yet to discover they've been entered in: Devoted Audience attrition. In the absence of WCW, there is nothing to counter. Live Raw broadcasts were instituted to compete with an opposing live show that no longer exists. Smackdown was a second show designed to offset WCW's second show. Heat and Velocity countered WCW's Puma or Spigot or whatever their shows were. Or, at least I think that's what their purpose was. The important thing here is that I don't really care. Judging by the ratings, I'm in the same boat as over 99 percent of Americans.

Likewise, the negative quality ratio is exacerbated by the seeming endlessness of programming. One season of a mediocre sitcom wastes 13 hours of your year, but one year of Raw where, say, only 50 percent of the episodes are mediocre still wastes 50 hours of your year. The waste keeps on coming. After a while, you notice that you're setting aside time every Monday for something that promises marginal rewards at best. It's the entertainment equivalent of sinking your money in the stock market just to get returns equal to the interest on a checking account. You give of yourself so much and get back little more than what you invested. With such regular personal dedication and fortitude, you would find a greater high just running for one hour, twice a week. You'd also be better off, in the long run.

Worse, relentless programming enables bad ideas to fuel themselves. Even though the WWE writers have only a passing acquaintance with continuity, they seem almost preternaturally devoted to it when it comes to bad ideas. Despite the opportunity to hit the "reset button" that writing week-to-week offers, idiotic stories are often pigheadedly followed through to their conclusion. Triple H baiting Booker on the basis of race continued in spite of the fact that Booker ultimately lost. Kane's Corpse-Raping Adventure was played out with a faithfulness apparently intended to induce pain in even irregular viewers.

Those are extreme examples, but they point up the failure of the system. Because, even when the system errs, its staggering inertia prevents correction. There are six hours to fill every week, with only two free weeks per year. The machine cannot stop. To reset a storyline means abandoning what was done the week before. That's not easy. For people responsible for hours upon hours of new content per week, a reset is a dangerous and almost olympic act, leading to massive amounts of corrective work. Better to keep with the error and see what happens. Better to lighten the enormous load by avoiding the excessiveness of revision. Better to keep pushing, another hour, another week, another year.

Good, tolerable or bad, it never stops. The shows don't stop. The weeks don't stop. You can take filet mignon and make a person gag on it by giving them too much. But the WWE isn't in the filet mignon business. They're in the hamburger business — quality flank ground with fat and gut and sinew. It is a tasty mix, most of the time, but it's all too easy to have too much of it. Whether by volume crammed into your gorge, or substandard quality foisted on your tastes, it's inevitable that you will come to a point where the effort of digestion isn't worth it. You reject it, or avoid it. Perhaps for a week or two, or months.

Irrespective of your level of commitment, burnout is the inevitable result. It may not be permanent, but permanence — of volume, of poor quality, of repetition, of everything — is its cause. No one need apologize for walking away. Given the structure of what we watch, it might even be expected of us.

Rick Scaia has responded to this column, with a Very Special Rebuttal: check out Learned Resignation 2 by clicking here!
 

E-MAIL JEB LUND
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Jeb Tennyson Lund is a regular columnist for Citizen Scholar, an online
journal. If you want to read his sadly less wrestling-oriented columns, go
to www.citizenscholar.net.

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