Bruce Prichard talks about the luxury of having an overrun and the importance of collapsible segments on a television program.
In present-day WWE, Bruce Prichard is the Executive Director of both Monday Night Raw and Friday Night SmackDown but for many years, Bruce Prichard was involved in television production getting back to the days of Prime Time Wrestling with Gorilla Monsoon and Bobby Heenan.
Bruce Prichard has seen the evolution of wrestling television from studio wrestling to the live spectacle that WWE is today producing at least 7 hours of original live wrestling programming every week.
On the latest episode of Something to Wrestle, Bruce Prichard was asked about formatting television shows, specifically making sure that certain segments are "collapsible" to make sure programs hit their times.
"The answer to your question is yes, you always have to have collapsible segments, you always have to have something that can be condensed to help you get to where you want to be at the top of the hour or the 30-minute mark, whatever, wherever you want to be at what time of day that you want to be there," Bruce explained. "So yes, you have collapsible segments that you can place in that could either go seven minutes, or they could go three minutes. You just have to have to build that in as time went on, and WCW started with their overruns because the owner of their company owned the network, too. They could go five minutes after us and people changing the channels off of us, man, they're gonna go over there. Well, hell They're still on, I'm gonna go check this out. And that would help them in the radians because it's another quarter-hour to tack on to the show. When we started getting the overruns from the USA Network, after a while it became, 'I don't need to fudge that much because I know I had that overrun.' I had a pat on the backside. So while I needed to be at a certain place that 10 o'clock hour, the rest of it pretty much, that last segment could go 20 minutes if we needed it to. We didn't have to hit a time per see, and that was a luxury."
Bruce also spoke about what happened after the Monday Night War ended and television overruns became commonplace in WWE. Bruce felt that when Monday Night Raw went to its present-day three-hour format, he believed that there was no longer a need for an overrun as he watched the show from home because he wasn't working with the company in 2012.
"But after WCW went away, and especially when they first went to three hours and I wasn't there at the time. I would watch and go, 'You don't need this overrun. You don't need to go over at this point. Three hours is enough.' Even two hours. you when you did it every week, it didn't become special. But after a while it just became, 'The show ends when the show ends.' Look, man, from a production standpoint, that's a nice luxury to have," Bruce said.
Even though he no longer speaks about current-day programming due to his current job with WWE, Bruce Prichard bill has great stories from the past that he shares on the podcast.
In this same episode, he spoke about Vince McMahon wanting the rock to wrestle a bear when WWE joined the New York Stock Exchange and put a ring in the middle of Wall Street. Read more here.
Early access to this podcast was granted via a subscription to AdFreeShows. Subscribe at this link for access to early podcast releases from names such as Jim Ross, Eric Bischoff, Bruce Prichard, Kurt Angle, and more.
If you use any of the quotes above, please credit the original source with a H/T and link back to Fightful for the transcription.
