Former WWE Writer Chris Dunn recently joined the Public Enemies podcast to discuss his time with the company, which included him recalling some marquee segments he got to work on and how hectic the creative team was during the pandemic era of WWE. Highlights from the interview can be found below.
Recalls 2018 segment with Bobby Lashley and his “sisters,” which got rewritten from its original concept:
I remember my second year in the company (WWE), a segment, ‘The Lashley Sisters’ (Dunn laughed). Horrible idea on many levels but those were the marching orders. So the writing team put three of its best entertainment writers on the segment and the goal of it was, ‘All right, how do we make this entertaining and good? And if we can’t do that, let’s at least make it not offensive or bad. How can we get it to just be like, we got through this’ and the original segment was awesome that was written. It was really great on the page. I think it’s some of the TNA guys — sorry, IMPACT guys now like, Robert Evans was involved, a couple other people, it’s Angelo Fazio who was there for like 10 or 12 years. Freddie Prinze [Jr.] brought him in. He was a writer who wrote a lot of killer segments and he actually pitched the CM Punk leaving with the title story. He was on it and they wrote something really great, and I think when people were seeing it, there was objections to it even though it was toned down to what the original pitch was and then I think we got to a point in the afternoon, a couple hours before the show went on where the segment was fine, it was watchable, it was not gonna be what it turned into. But then, a couple people went to Vince [McMahon] and tried to convince him to kill the segment completely, which sometimes when you tell a person something who has opinions that he’s wrong, they dig in and he went back to the original concept, what aired… The ratings on that segment did awesome. It’s just what ended up going on-air was not what they wrote.
On working with the Viking Raiders and The Street Profits during the early days of the pandemic:
A quick dumb thing I never got to do — I’ll give you two quick dumb things. One we did that we ended up not airing. That did not work and one thing that got cut every single week was during the off sites with The [Street] Profits and The Viking Raiders, I became really close with those guys, all four of them… That’s also too trying to turn an idea that’s not great and turn it into something because the original concepts for that, not great but it worked out really well. When we kind of accidentally made Ivar a ‘ladies man’ character, we wanted to eventually have him open a website that would be ‘Vikings Only’ like Farmers Only. I think we changed it because of OnlyFans to — I think people (were) getting confused to like ‘Vikings mingle’. But we literally had it in the script for seven-to-eight weeks and because of how crazy the pandemic stuff was, things kept on changing on the fly all the time.
(H/T and transcribed by Post Wrestling)
