[Tom Guycott]

Originally Posted by Mr. Nerfect I liked the match I saw between him and Johnny Gargano. The whole “talk show host” thing is just so played out though. [...] It does have that WWE veneer over the top of everything. Could definitely use the feeling of being more organic. A lot of their “great talkers” aren’t really great. Waller, in particular.

I prob'ly should have just left the whole quote and bolded these, but I wanted to address these two things in particular:

Wasn't the talk show thing in his case initially in place to cover for some injury? I thought this case in particular was similar to the whole Randy Orton/RNN/shoulder injury "update inturruption" vignettes around his debut. But, you are right, there is an overutilization of guys having a "talk show" with set dressing on a show that already features a lot of talking as opposed to what it is supposed to be featuring.

But that kind of goes into that second bit I cropped about the "WWE veneer over the top of everything". And with all that formula often comes detriment. You can't explicitly judge how well a "great talker" is or isn't until they get an opportunity to actually show it. Sometimes, you'll have a situation like Big Show, who, for the longest time, had the knock on him that he "lacked charisma". All that lasted for YEARS until he got the chance to be funny on an SNL appearance alongside HHH and Mick Foley for one of The Rock's earler guest spots there. If he hadn't been there, Show's whole persona would have prob'ly been consistently distilled to "giant smash" until he was done with the company, and nobody would have had any idea how much "charisma" the man had. More recently, we can go to their current cash cow in Roman Reigns.

There was a lot of hay made about how absolutely gawdawful he was on the mic. Even by myself, as I like to point out his fucking abysmal "I'm the man" speil. However, at the same time he was the silent heavy for The Shield or given gems like "suffering succotash", a lot of folks on social media - both fans and other wrestlers - thought he came off as a really cool guy in person at fan events and such, and wondered why he sounded like such a hokey dork on TV when he was so chill and quick witted in person.

It's not always a failing of the talent, even though that is WWE's - and in particular, Vince's - go-to excuse when sometimes, they're being hamstrung by the very machine behind them being OVERLY formulaic with how things supposedly should work. Drew McIntyre's initial run was pretty sucky thanks to WWE creative, and then he basically made the most of his time there with the 3MB stuff before getting housecleaned. After being allowed to show what he could work and how he could talk on the indies, the same company that saw no value because of how shitty his setup was wanted him back. He was going to fire Kane because both of his initial gimmicks were ass. He had to be talked into keeping John Cena because he "didn't see it" in him.

Meanwhile, when things ARE WORKING that aren't in the plans - like LA Knight, or Daniel Bryan (even if you ignore them ignoring him, the whole Wyatt Family heel turn was a naked attempt to kill that push), or even the initial rise of Austin 3:16 (folks forget, Austin was just "a good hand" destined in Vince's eyes to be a perpetual midcarder at best, and capitalizing on the trend while eliminating what was clearly hot bootleg merchandise was what reluctantly changed his mind) usually get ignored, pushed aside, treated like a fad when it isn't or distilled down to a fad and getting in on it too late (Fandango's music - the tried to kill the crowd doing it at first, then after pigeonholing him as insignificant, decides that's the time to tell everyone "the crowd is Fandangoing!"

They set up a guy like a Baron Corbin to be this immediate big deal waaaaaayyyy before he was ready for it, exposed him as being green and totally not ready, then tried to push him anyway forever and let him flail for years in a lot of unimpressive roles. Now that he's way more comfortable in his own skin and could prob'ly get away with what they tried to groom him for like a decade ago, they aren't even considering it. On the flip side, you get a guy like Bron Breakker who is basically still in NXT for no reason. He was pretty much ready for prime time as he walked in the door, but he gets to waste time in his career for no other real reason than it appears he just isn't in the cards for the main roster right now. And yes, I know those two are in a program with one another right now, but one should be on the way up, and the other had to fall from a great height that he needed to recover from but shouldn't have had to.

Overall, the TL;DR of it is that there are a lot of times WWE is WWE's biggest problem with a talent. They could feisably be sitting on a wealth of above average talkers, but you'd never know, because they're either tragically mute or get shitty scripts and catchphrases.