Bischoff on if Lucha Underground could be successful in the current era

In a recent edition of 83 Weeks, Eric Bischoff discussed if Lucha Underground could be successful in the current era, the challenges of the Lucha Underground format, and much more. You can read Bischoff’s comments below.

Bischoff on if Lucha Underground could be successful in the current era:

“I loved the experiment. I loved the way the backstage segments evolved and told a story, but I think it was a little too much. It was too radically different from what the wrestling audience had experienced. Do I think something like that would work today? With some modification, yes. Wrestling is – if you’re not AEW or WWE on a high-profile, upper-tier cable platform, it’s a niche of a niche. Wrestling is still a niche product. It’s a big niche, but it’s a niche. Lucha would be a niche of a nice. Could it work on certain platforms? Sure. It could be viable and financially successful, but it would be on a very, very small scale. It wouldn’t be something that could possibly compete with AEW or WWE. That would never happen, but it could still be financially viable.”

On the impact of the live vs. taped aspect and the challenges of the Lucha Underground format:

“I think something as niche as Lucha Underground would, because it would be targeted to a very specific audience, I don’t think it would have to be live. The challenge with Lucha was – even if you’re doing live to tape, meaning basically, you’re taping the show but making it feel live. If you can achieve that, you can overcome the fact that you’re not live because you’re producing it in such a way that would feel live. I don’t think giving away the finishes and spoilers and all that is the biggest challenge. I think the biggest challenge is convincing people that it is live when it isn’t. That’s where Lucha had a problem. They took a very cinematic approach to a lot of the dialogue and backstage scenes. It just was so different than what the audience was accustomed to that it took them out of that live feeling. You couldn’t tell by watching the matches whether they were live or not, but the minute you took the audience backstage into that traditional cinematic or typical television version of a backstage scene, you jolted the audience out of the experience. You took from one experience into another experience. Those two were so drastically different from each other that the audience at home felt disconnected from it. That was the challenge of that type of format.”