Members of the TV Academy . . .” an over-the-top, ringside-style announcer’s voice thundered from the wings of the Wolf Theatre stage in North Hollywood on Wednesday night, signaling that this was not going to be a typical, polite, For Your Consideration event, as WWE made its debut in a fighting ring of another, equally sweaty sort—Emmy season.
“It’s the best-kept secret in entertainment, WWE,” the company’s chief brand officer, Stephanie McMahon, said in an interview before the Television Academy event. “And we don’t want to be a secret anymore.”
WWE stars including Ronda Rousey, Paul “Triple H” Levesque, Nikki Bella, Brie Bella, Roman Reigns, Shawn Michaels, Charlotte Flair, Alexa Bliss, Nia Jax, Sasha Banks, Naomi, Braun Strowman, Jimmy Uso, and the New Day (Big E, Kofi Kingston, and, Xavier Woods) joined McMahon on stage speaking to Emmy voters about topics such as inclusion, fan engagement, social-media use, and even body image, subjects where they are, arguably, ahead of much of the rest of entertainment industry. While ABC’s The Bachelor can’t seem to find a single woman in America over size two, WWE’s current women’s title holder, Nia Jax, is a six-foot-tall, 272-pound Samoan-German athlete and plus-size model who promotes body positivity. “As women, we’re taught to be as small as possible,” Rousey said, speaking on the all-women panel that closed the evening. “You have a right to be here.”
The Emmy campaign comes as WWE is at a crossroads, in the midst of negotiating a new juggernaut TV deal with Fox. In an era when luring mass audiences to watch live TV has grown ever harder for networks, WWE is increasingly valuable, as wrestling and the scripted dramas that surround it continue to attract a broad and vocal viewership. As McMahon told the TV Academy audience, in a remark that drew gasps and applause, WWE’s primetime USA Network show, Monday Night Raw—its signature, Monday-night fight show—is the longest-running weekly episodic-television program in history, surpassing Lassie, Gunsmoke, and The Simpsons. WWE’s SmackDown Live is the second-longest running such program.
Among the Emmy categories the nearly $3 billion sports-entertainment company is competing in are structured reality series, for WWE Raw; unstructured reality, for its E! show about the lives of female wrestlers, Total Divas; and live variety special, for its version of the Super Bowl, Wrestlemania.
Compared to a typical FYC Emmys event, which features a screening and Q&A about matters of craft, WWE’s pitch was high on showmanship, if low on topics like production design and performance. Perhaps not surprisingly, coming from a company that meticulously plots its fights, McMahon’s remarks were tightly scripted, and the WWE catchphrase—“We put smiles on people’s faces”—was liberally deployed throughout the evening. The audience was a bit light on a night with competing Emmy-season events for Netflix’s Black Mirror, National Geographic’s One Strange Rock, and an HBO documentary roundtable. Based on who was on the street outside the TV Academy in North Hollywood, the event probably could have yielded a thrilled, packed house of fans, if only they had TV Academy member cards.
The Emmy voters I spoke with after the event seemed delighted by the company’s chutzpah, if skeptical of its pitch that WWE’s shows constitute serious storytelling. “It’s no different than a great television show, a great movie, an opera, a play—WWE tells stories,” McMahon said to me in our interview. “It’s protagonist versus antagonist with conflict resolution. The basic fundamentals of storytelling. The only difference is that our conflicts are settled inside a 20-by-20 foot ring, with some of the greatest live action that you can see in any Hollywood movie, in any stunts, in any sport.” At the TV Academy, McMahon made an even bolder bid, comparing WWE to cultural phenomena like Hamilton, Stranger Things, and The Handmaid’s Tale.
“I already sent her flowers,” Lewis told Flo Combat. “You’re trying to distract me. I’ve got to fight extra hard, she might go to the fight. She might be watching. Now I’m nervous.”
