WWE Considered Cooking Show For Performance Center TV

When the Coronavirus started becoming a very real problem across the world, many businesses and companies had to think outside the box to continue to make money and keep afloat.

However, WWE has largely remained the same. With the exception of moving shows into the Performance Center and away from a paying crowd, the content of WWE shows hasn’t really changed a great deal.

However, according to former lead WWE writer Chris DeJoseph (aka Big Dick Johnson), the creative team were told to think of some rather unique ideas at the beginning of the pandemic in the instance that WWE couldn’t put on wrestling shows.

DeJoseph noted to PW Torch’s Wade Keller that WWE considered many things, including people recording content from home over Zoom, as well as a cooking show at the Performance Center:

“We don’t even know if we would be able to have wrestlers wrestle each other. Are we going to do cooking segments? They asked all of us to run down a list of outside-of-the-box ideas of things that we could do.It was a huge compiled list. It was everything from have a big fight in the office to a cooking segment if we have to. Do we have everyone on Zoom from home? There were so many ideas because nobody knew what we were going to be able to do.”

During the interview, DeJoseph spoke about WWE considering having fans reacting to shows with big screens several months ago. Here’s what he had to say on the matter:

“There was a lot of discussion about getting fans on screen watching the show and reacting. It started with SmackDown, and Fox had just tried it with a NASCAR race, and they didn’t feel it was worth doing. After going through all the trouble, they didn’t think the payoff really affected the show all that much. And you really can’t control what the audience reaction is. Also, eventually those shows we started doing in advance and it kind of became impossible to do something like that. There were also sorts of ideas, like live Twitter reactions.

“Everything was thrown against the wall. There was talk of animated fans. Nobody really knows what we’re doing here because it’s a whole new world. You’re watching other shows and seeing how they’re handling it. There was an idea – I threw an idea out there to have legends come on and do taped segments with them to add some newness to the show. We didn’t know if [the wrestlers would] even be allowed to wrestle each other at that point.”

For those that don’t know, DeJoseph was fired by WWE earlier this year. The man formerly known as Big Dick Johnson only returned to the company at the end of 2019 at the TLC pay-per-view.

• Cooking show
• chris dejoseph
• Coronavirus
• wwe

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