Take That, You Wimps

It’s customary around this time of year for journalists who cover television to sit at the knee of network executives, listening to them dispense wisdom about prevailing programming trends and who will be victorious as the new prime-time season’s scheduling shenanigans get underway.

Bor-ring!

As the great philosopher Batman once said, “Criminals are a cowardly, superstitious lot,” and the same description currently applies to TV executives. Most choose their words carefully these days for fear of offending someone, from advocacy groups pushing one cause or another to headline-seeking politicians to penny-pinching corporate bosses, who lately do a fair impersonation of the great and powerful Oz, pulling strings and moving levers behind the scenes.

With that in mind, to preview the new TV season we decided to engage a group that has demonstrated a firm grasp on what a segment of the public wants to see and has few compunctions about offending, well, just about anybody.

This refers, of course, to the self-proclaimed “superstars” of the World Wrestling Federation. More than 20 million viewers tune in the WWF on cable or broadcast television each week, with 7.3 million people--most of them men between 18 and 34 or teenage boys--watching UPN’s “WWF Smackdown!” on Thursday nights last season, easily the top-rated program on that network.

The WWF regularly tops all fare on cable, garners millions in pay-per-view events and sells out arenas across the country. The Rock, one of its stalwarts, spoke at the Republican National Convention, and the federation has launched a voter registration drive with the same sort of vigor its characters exhibit springing across the ring.

Proving that UPN, which helped arrange the session, really does have a sense of humor (some of its sitcoms notwithstanding), the discussion with nine members of the WWF touring company took place at the posh Le Meridien Hotel in Beverly Hills. They were subsequently treated to lunch at the Grill, dining next to would-be super-agents and Hollywood executives.

The group included tag-team champs Edge and Christian; reigning women’s champion Lita, known for her arsenal of “moonsaults” and “hurracanranas”; Terri, who doesn’t wrestle full time, inflicting mayhem outside the ring as a “manager” of the combatants; acrobatic tag-team the Hardy Boyz, also known as Matt and Jeff; former women’s champions the Kat and Ivory, whose most impressive feats may involve staying in their skimpy outfits as they leap around; and veteran Jerry “The King” Lawler, whose career highlights include his bouts with the late Andy Kaufman in the early 1980s.

This is clearly not the wrestling that middle-aged men remember from the 1950s and ‘60s, except perhaps for the moves one uses to avoid being pinned and the popularity of folding chairs as a weapon. Under impresario Vince McMahon, the WWF has embraced the fakery--or at least, the scripted nature of the mayhem--which prompted head slaps from irate behemoths when questioned in the past.

Dressed up for the new millennium, wrestling is now big business, and its artists have no problem defending the product they offer.

“What it boils down to is people who watch television want to be entertained, and somehow, the World Wrestling Federation has found a formula to be the most entertaining show on television,” says Lawler, who once ran for mayor of Memphis and delivers a pretty pointed stump speech, even wearing tights.

“I guess the way they do that [is to be] a hybrid of all forms of popular entertainment. There’s beautiful women on the show, good-looking young guys, there’s a soap-opera aspect, where you can get involved in the people’s characters and their lives and what they’re doing. There’s the athletic part of it, the wrestling itself, [and] it’s like watching a fireworks show or going to a rock concert. Everything people like is in there.”

Though the idea sounded flippant at first, talking with these WWF stars about what fuels their success and how they address fans and critics may shed more light on what currently drives popular culture than those annual forums of network entertainment chiefs, the latest held last week in Beverly Hills and moderated by Larry King.

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Ask any WWF superstar (“wrestler” is considered somewhat pejorative) what the audience wants, and they repeatedly turn to a familiar theme: escapism.

“What it all boils down to is it’s an escape from everyday life--an escape from your boss, from work, from the kids who are picking on you at school, for two or three hours a night,” explains Edge, an imposing 6-foot-4 native of Canada who, once he starts talking, could pass for a large grad student in political science.

“We don’t pull the wool over anyone’s eyes,” he continues. “It’s definitely entertainment. Where people get confused is there’s so much athleticism involved. The tables are real. The chairs are real. . . . There’s a huge physical aspect involved.”

His tag-team partner, Christian, also points out that wrestling is always there for viewers with original programming, unlike most popular series. “There’s not an off-season and there’s no reruns,” Christian says. “We’re live every week.”

“It’s escapism,” Jerry agrees. “I think [fans] really know it’s characters, but they want to believe in us. They want to believe that these guys are almost superheroes, live vicariously through these guys. . . . When I see Terri on TV, I don’t want to think of her as going home and changing a diaper. You have to do that in your life. You want to see somebody on television who’s bigger than life.”

Viewers can even get emotionally involved, adds Ivory, who, except for the biceps, would no doubt remind most any straight male of the worst hopeless high school crush he ever had.

“We used to say it’s soap opera with action,” she says. “Now it’s ‘Here is a cast of characters who go to work as professional wrestlers.’ It’s almost like the audience gets to come into our lives and know us as people, and then watch us go to work in the ring.”

Of course, not everyone can make that distinction. Terri says there are plenty of “wackadoos” who can’t always differentiate between fantasy and reality. “The other night these guys called the [hotel] room and said, ‘There’s only four of us,’ ” she says.

Hearing that, it’s easy to make the leap to television’s critics, those who say kids are being brainwashed and influenced and are imitating the awful things they see on TV--including the WWF.

Using a standard wrestling maneuver, however, the superstars quickly turn the tables--spinning off the ropes to put their critics on the defensive. Breaking from TV industry moguls--who are reluctant to fire back, perhaps for fear of uncomfortable moments at the next Democratic Party fund-raiser--Jerry firmly places a headlock on the political class.

“They’re all up on a soapbox saying the entertainment industry is shoving all this violence down the youth of America’s throat,” he says. “Well, I think one of the big things that lead to that is our politicians, who have got the country in the shape it’s in where a man cannot support his family anymore, so you have to have both the man and woman working.

“So we’ve got a country that uses the television as its baby-sitter. Society has changed, so the parents are both out working and the kids are sitting in front of the television with no parental guidance to decide what these kids watch. The politicians are to blame for that. It’s not the entertainment industry.”

There is no ostensible tag, but Edge enters the ring anyway.

“Growing up, I wanted to be Rambo. So if it’s not wrestling, it will be something else,” he contends. “People got on the [Mighty Morphin] Power Rangers, and things like that. Well, anything that involves superhero aspects, kids are going to want to emulate. I wanted to be Spider-Man too. It’s just going to happen.”

Jerry, it turns out, is just warming up. He notes that when he was young--and wrestling was around then too--kids would get angry and settle their differences by slugging it out by the flagpole. Now, they’re shooting each other.

“We don’t have anybody shooting anybody, anybody stabbing anybody, anybody dying,” he says of the WWF.

“You watch the news and you get frightened and don’t want to talk to any other human being,” adds Ivory, who--doing her part to stop youth violence--recently broke up a fight between two awe-struck 10-year-old boys at the school where her sister teaches. “Then you switch the channel to our show and go, ‘Ooh, what fun.’ ”

“That’s what it’s all about,” says Jeff. “The bottom line is sit back for two hours and get away, not have to worry about your normal life.”

In fact, Ivory favorably compares the archetypes exhibited on the WWF--which screams fantasy at every turn--with a sitcom family where an impossibly beautiful teenager “with a boob job” sits sniping at her brother and parents.

“It’s gross, because you go, ‘What family is really like that?’ ” she says. “You flash through them and go, ‘That is so not real,’ and so unlike what you hope any kid thinks other households are like, because they talk bratty to each other. . . . I don’t dig that at all.”

Terri, the mother of a 6-year-old daughter, says she is careful about what her child watches but laments that not everyone exercises such discretion. She recalls seeing a couple bring two young children into the R-rated slasher film “Scream 2.”

“I’m sitting there as a parent thinking, ‘That’s the kid that’s going to stab my kid,’ ” she says. “Parents have to choose at what age their kids can watch this and watch that. I think it’s ridiculous when those damn censorship people try to take away our rights. It’s the parents’ choice, and they have to be smart about it.”

“That’s a fact of life. Everybody is not a perfect parent,” Jerry adds.

Violence, of course, is just part of the issue. Parents worry equally, according to surveys, about the sexuality their children encounter on television. And while Terri admits she isn’t fond of her daughter watching pop icon Britney Spears strut around onstage, even Madonna in her pre-motherhood days would have a hard time matching the WWF in the exposed flesh department--the kind of images, some suggest, that foster unrealistic and harmful expectations among young girls.

So how would Terri respond to that? “I say, ‘Thank God for plastic surgery,’ ” she deadpans.

“If you’re a good parent, you sit down and talk to your children and maybe watch it with them,” says Edge. “It’s not like we’re on in the middle of the day. We’re on at night. . . . If they do watch the whole show, explain it to them, that we’re playing characters.”

While the athleticism on display is real--so much so that Matt maintains even professional athletes frequently ask how large men can throw their bodies around with such abandon--wrestlers insist their fans “get it,” a WWF slogan with a double meaning.

The WWF specializes in conflict, and its characters spend as much time barking at opponents as body-slamming them. At times, in fact, the amount of ring action takes a back seat to the soap opera--developing story lines that draw young men in as surely as “Melrose Place” attracted their female counterparts.

“The matches are still what it boils down to, but now if you can talk, they’ll mention your catch phrases and repeat them to you,” Edge says of his encounters with fans. “That’s what you hear the most as you’re walking by--that, or ‘You suck.’ ”

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Despite WWF’s popularity with teens and even younger kids, the organization insists it doesn’t market its product to children, but rather those young males with which advertisers are so enamored.

Again, Jerry offers a more pointed answer than most Hollywood suits can muster when Sen. Joe Lieberman and other culture warriors come knocking.

“Anything that’s on television is able to be watched by anyone who has got a television,” Jerry says. “But that doesn’t mean it’s meant for everybody.”

The WWF won’t be affected by a possible writers’ strike next year because its employees aren’t covered by the Writers Guild of America.

And if the television industry does grind to a halt, as many suspect, it won’t be a major hardship to these superstars--who, working rock-star hours as they travel the country, tend not to watch much television themselves and virtually no prime-time series on the major networks.

Lita, 25, loves MTV, “The Real World” and HBO’s “Sex and the City,” she says, “where it doesn’t sound like a script that they’re reading off of.” Edge, 26, favors VH1’s “Behind the Music,” MTV’s Tom Green and Dennis Miller. Jeff, 23, enjoys Animal Planet’s “Crocodile Hunter,” and Matt, 25, likes David Letterman, MTV and sports.

“The West Wing,” you say? The Kat, 29, hasn’t heard of it. Terri, 33, enjoys newsmagazines and “Entertainment Tonight.” Jerry, 50, is a sports enthusiast, but no fan of “Survivor” and its ilk. “I hate that stuff,” he says.

Clearly, none of the WWF superstars envies the challenge network executives face. Even grappling with daily aches and pains, Ivory says she regularly thinks, “What else would I do? A 40-hour-a-week job, where I see the same people every day in the same place?”

Sure, they endure physical punishment in the name of show business, including such stunts as a “TLC” match--meaning the combatants bash each other with tables, ladders and chairs. “Sponsored by Home Depot,” Edge quips.

And to answer the question, no, there is no good way--even if it’s just part of the act--to get hit with a metal folding chair or tumble off the top ropes onto your head. The wrestlers say it’s no worse than any athlete who risks injury, and that the job is not without its rewards.

As Edge puts it, “When you land you go, ‘That hurt, but listen to that crowd.’ ”

The pain is worth it, in other words, when the audience registers its approval. Now there’s an honest sentiment you might even hear out of a network executive.