Chris Jericho Reveals Vince McMahon Started Hiring Writers For WWE To Compete With The Hit Sitcom “Friends”

On the latest episode of Talk Is Jericho, AEW superstar Chris Jericho revealed the moment that Chairman Vince McMahon decided to hire writers for WWE, stating that McMahon was keen on competing with the hit comedy series Friends. Highlights are below.

How his WWE debut was NOT scripted and how WWE is not too overly processed:

It’s funny because when I got to WWE, my famous first promo with The Rock when I interrupted him, there were no writers at that point. That was late 1999 and no rehearsals either. Rock, and I and [Vince] Russo went over in the back, but there was no going through it. As you know, a few years later, that became the norm, which is part of what my opinion of one of the issues there is everything is so overly scripted and overly processed.

Says writers became a thing in WWE to compete with Friends:

The reason why writers became a thing was when we started SmackDown, which was right after I got there, August ’99, Vince made it his motto that SmackDown was going to be bigger than ‘Friends’. We’re going to beat ‘Friends’ on Thursday, and his reasoning and idea and strategy was well ‘Friends’ has writers, then we need writers too.

Check out the full Talk Is Jericho below. (H/T and transcribed by Wrestling Inc.)