When Vince McMahon was still calling the shots in WWE, it became all too common for RAW and SmackDown's scripts to be torn up not just hours before a show went on the air, but also while it took place!
Advertised matches frequently wouldn't happen and the shows were often hard to watch given their messy, nonsensical layout.
Several WWE Superstars have said how much better - and easier - it is working in a WWE run by Triple H. Now, Randy Orton has chimed in, shedding new light on just how challenging it was to be part of McMahon's bizarre approach to these weekly shows.
"With Nick Khan, Triple H, and Bruce Prichard, so many things have changed from a creative standpoint," he started. "They're thinking months and months and months in advance. Before, we were kind of flying by the seat of our pants. Creative was changed minutes before we went live each week."
"I don't mean sometimes. I mean, each week creative was changed. It'd be 5:00 p.m. You'd be on the East Coast going live in two or 3 hours, and you wouldn't know what you were doing, you know, and that's a very stressful environment, and you're not going to have the best product in the world if you're doing it like that every week."
"So just purely from a creative standpoint, you're able to let it marinate and think about, okay, how am I gonna do this? Or how can I make this better?" Orton added. "Or maybe there are tweaks, but you don't do it ten minutes before you go live."
The quality of WWE's output has improved dramatically in recent months, with long-term storytelling, better matches, and more memorable promos.
McMahon stepped away from creative duties some time before finally being forced out of the company earlier this year, but still chimed in now and again (typically over Zoom). However, he took charge of last year's RAW after WrestleMania and delivered one of the worst episodes ever.
Orton has returned to WWE with renewed purpose, saying this week that he's got no plans to retire in the near future.
"I don't want to do the old Undertaker or Shawn Michaels schedule, which they needed to do, understandably. Wrestling at WrestleMania, take the summer off, maybe you see them at SummerSlam," Orton explained. "I want to be on the road every week. I want to make all the TVs. I want to be on all the PLEs."
"At 44, I would love to be able to go until my 50's. Maybe I wrestle until I'm 50 and call it. That's 30 years, 30 years with the same company, on top."
Check out the full interview with Orton below.