After just four months as the executive producer of SmackDown, Eric Bischoff was given his walking papers at WWE.
This raises immediate questions as to whether or not AEW will look to bring Bischoff in, possibly as soon as Wednesday for Dynamite on TNT. Bischoff was the king of “shock and awe moments” 20 years ago while running WCW Nitro on TNT, as any recognizable talent that was let go by WWE was fair game to show up on Nitro immediately.
Curiously, the firing of Bischoff comes less than a week after he made the following comments praising AEW.
“I think the takeaway for me, the biggest thing I saw [with AEW] that I liked was the crowd,” Bischoff said on his 83 Weeks podcast, admitting that he watched the show twice. “I’ve always believed that the crowd, you know, if there’s two women or two guys in a match with a referee as the third person in the ring, the fourth person in the ring is the audience. They’re as much a part of the show as anything in my opinion. And I think what I saw Wednesday night from AEW was a crowd that was just intensely engaged in the product in the ring and in the show. And from a production value point of view, you could see it. The lighting made the audience part of the show and that to me was my biggest positive of that show.”
