Triple H Reveals What He Does After a WWE Show Goes Wrong

WWE has seen numerous changes ever since Triple H took over as the Head of Creative, but that doesn’t mean every single WWE show has been a huge success. In fact, Triple H has now explained how he deals with crafting bad shows.

While speaking to High Performance, Triple H talked about how he handles creating a bad wrestling show. He said you can’t get stuck thinking about it. He admitted there are things he’d like to change, moments that didn’t land creatively, and times he looks back and thinks that was awful. But in wrestling, there’s always another show. If SmackDown on Friday wasn’t great, they get to try again next week.

“You can’t dwell on it. Are there things I would change? Are there, you know, moments or creatively where you think like, ‘God damn, that was terrible,’ or whatever? Sure. You have a bad event—it’s… we have all these sayings in the business: ‘Well, that was bad. Oh, we get to do it again tomorrow.’ You know what I mean? Like, if Friday SmackDown show wasn’t very good—well, we get to do it again.”

When asked what he does after a show doesn’t go well, Triple H said he asks himself what went wrong. Sometimes he imagined it one way, but it just didn’t come together, and that’s part of being creative. Just like no one sets out to make a “pretty good” movie, but sometimes things don’t translate the way you hoped.

Triple H noted that maybe the crowd didn’t react, the performances were off, or a key moment was missed by the cameras during the live broadcast. Sometimes there’s a clear reason and other times, it just doesn’t click.

“What did I miss? Why? Sometimes it’s… sometimes it just doesn’t—I envisioned it this way, didn’t come out that way on paper. You know, it’s, um… it’s just part of the creative process. Like, nobody writes a movie or a book or something and thinks like, ‘I’m going to make this pretty good,’ or, ‘I’m going to, you know, I’m looking to shoot a mediocre movie here,’ right? But then it just doesn’t come out the way you envision it coming out—whatever changes, people didn’t buy it the way they did, the performance wasn’t the way you expected it to be, it didn’t get shot the way you wanted it to be.

We—you know, our stuff’s live, right? So if there’s an emotional moment you need to capture and it’s just during the wrong camera shot when the emotion happens and you’re like, ‘God, they missed it.’ Like, ‘Oh my God,’ right? And you just think like, ‘That just didn’t work the way I wanted it to.’ But that’s okay. Like, why didn’t it work that way? Like, why? And sometimes there’s reasons and sometimes it’s just—it’s just the way it worked out. It just… it didn’t click.”

Triple H also warned about falling into a creative slump. He compared it to athletes losing their confidence, like a baseball player in a hitting slump. Once that doubt sets in, it’s hard to break out of it.

That’s why he says it’s important to enjoy the parts that worked, learn from the parts that didn’t, and then move forward. You can’t get too high or too low, because success and failure can flip in a second. The key is to keep putting in the work and aiming to be great, without living in the past.

“So you just got to get back into the next creative groove and go, you know? And you have to be careful that it doesn’t become a rut—that you start to like, you know… I think about it in sports all the time—people get themselves into slumps, hitting in baseball or whatever, because they just—they start to lose their confidence, start to lose their thing. Like, you can’t do that to yourself. You just have to—you get past the things that worked, you feel good about the things that worked, you revel in that for a moment, you kick yourself for a minute about the stuff that didn’t work, and then you move on. And it’s never like, ‘Hey, how great are we at this?’ Because that can be this in a moment. And it’s never, ‘How terrible are we at this?’ Because that can be great in a moment. It’s just—you just have to keep working your ass off to be great—to deliver something great at all times—and forget about, like, the past. It always exists.”

This comes after many in WWE feel Friday Night SmackDown has not been up to par lately. Nevertheless, Triple H being open with fans helps them better understand how much work goes into WWE’s weekly shows. He shows that every match and storyline is the result of a hardworking team that’s always learning, making changes, and doing their best to entertain. Therefore, he made it clear he won’t dwell on the bad and focus on improving.

What do you think about Triple H’s approach to handling bad WWE shows? Have you noticed segments that didn’t land the way they were probably intended? Share your thoughts in the comments below—we’d love to hear your take!

Please credit Ringside News if you use the above transcript in your publication.