Chris Jericho On When He First Felt Like He Was Losing Creative Freedom In WWE

During his appearance on “Keeping It 100”, Chris Jericho talked about the differences between WWE and AEW and when he first realized that he had lost his creative freedom with the WWE. Here are the highlights:

On How WWE & AEW Differ:

Honestly, the biggest difference is the creative freedom, I think. And I’m not saying that in a burial of the WWE’s system. It’s the way it is, there’s a lot of writers and there’s approvals, and there’s a lot of levels of government that you have to go through to get something done. And you could have the best idea in the world, once it goes through the approval process, that 100% might be down to 75% or 65%.

AEW, it’s not the case. A good idea is a good idea. Most of the stuff that you see me do comes from my brain or a collaboration with Tony Khan or Cody Rhodes, or Nick Jackson or whoever it may be. But it’s not like they’re working against it. We’re working for it, and there’s been very few times where there’s been disagreements. Obviously, Tony’s the boss and what he says goes. But there’s very few disagreements, if he knows that you have an idea that you really feel passionate about, he most of the time goes with it because he’s a real open-thinking type of guy. So it’s a lot more freedom in allowing artists to be artists. After 30 years of doing this, I think I kind of know what to do, and I’m being allowed to do that.

On When He Felt Like He Lost His Creative Freedom In WWE:

Pretty much right after that [the Y2J thing], I remember they brought Brian Gewirtz in. And I’d say probably, I’d say less than six months after I started, is when writers started coming in. And you know, it’s done as a positive to help work together, to put together the best stuff you can. But then it suddenly morphed into relying completely on writers to hand guys scripts. And obviously it’s Vince’s world, so Vince probably decided he wanted it to be more like a sitcom, like Friends or Seinfeld or something like that. Meanwhile, as you all know, nobody can write a promo for you better than you can. So it kind of just started a big quagmire of writers vs. guys when everyone’s supposed to be working toward the same thing, but they pretty much were at odds as a result.

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Credit: Keeping It 100. H/T 411Mania.