WWE Shakes up Creative Teams for Both WWE Raw and WWE SmackDown Live
With SmackDown on its way to FOX and a new WWE Draft reportedly on the way for both brands, WWE [...]
With SmackDown on its way to FOX and a new WWE Draft reportedly on the way for both brands, WWE recently made some changes to the creative teams for both Monday Night Raw and SmackDown Live.
Ryan Ward, the head writer for SmackDown, reportedly recently stepped away from his position on personal leave. According to both Pro Wrestling Sheet and the Wrestling Observer, Raw lead writer Ed Koskey will serve as the new head writer for the Blue Brand, while Jonathan Baeckstrom will take over as the head writer for Raw and work under Raw executive director Paul Heyman.
Baeckstrom has been writing for the company for the past six years and was previously the lead writer for 205 Live.
Pro Wrestling Sheet's Ryan Satin added that, according to a source, the writing team "has officially been split and people were assigned to specific brands ahead of the company debuting on FOX."
On top of all of that, WWE will move the NXT brand from the WWE Network to the USA Network starting on Sept. 18. The show will be extended to two hours and switch from a pretaped format to live. These changes led some fans to worry that because of the network change, Vince McMahon may step in and become more involved with the show's weekly creative direction. Triple H addressed those concerns in a recent interview with talkSPORT.
"People look at where it is today and sometimes say negative things and I'm like 'really?' because we've signed billion-dollar deals with FOX and USA, I'm not sure that it's crumbling! And he's [Vince is] also smart enough to understand the things that we do and where they go and how, the pieces of it," Hunter said. "If you're asking the simple term in answers? He's not involved. Yeah, he's going to have some say in some things as far as where the brand sits and the marketing of it within USA and all that stuff and clearly, whatever he wants to do at the end of the day also, but truth is at this point in time he has basically just said 'go and make this thing a success.'
"It's what he told me in the beginning 'go make this thing a success' and, you know, we pick up the phone every now and then and we see each other all the time but it's like 'how's it going? going good? excellent'. and we move on. But those who want to speculate on it, it's craziness," he continued. "A lot of it is silliness."
