Details On Why Smackdown Was Rewritten This Week, Who Worked On The Episode

The Wrestling Observer Newsletter reports that this week’s episode of Smackdown Live in Memphis was rewritten hours before the show aired by Vince McMahon, who felt the prior draft didn’t do a good job following up from last week and didn’t build Summerslam enough. This confirms reports from earlier in the week that Vince asked for the show to get rewritten, with a match featuring The New Day vs. Elias and Drew McIntyre changed to The New Day vs. The OC in a six-man tag, which was then changed to just AJ Styles vs. Kofi Kingston. Vince reportedly did the same thing with last week’s episode.

Eric Bischoff and Bruce Prichard worked on this week’s show, but Bischoff doesn’t have a lot of creative input as he’s learning the characters, stories and the creative system. McMahon was reportedly still making changes to the second hour of the program while the first hour was taking place.

The report also notes that Shane McMahon, Kevin Owens and Daniel Bryan pitch their ideas to the writers so their segments usually come in directly from them, but they’re the only three the writers seem to listen to.