Paul Heyman made (mainstream US) wrestling grow up goes the thought, but I don't think it ever did. The "Attitude" era wasn't grown-up at all. It was for an older audience than "The New Generation" era and the Hogan era, sure, but if those previous eras were "childish" then 98-01 was, at most, adolescent.

Realistically the next logical step was to become more adult; more intelligent. They can give Chris Jericho every Backlundword under the sun to say in his promos (without as best I can recall actually going into depth on why the audience are) but there's nothing clever about that, a half-decent thesaurus is all you'd need.

Maybe wrestling has got to the point where it's been known as benign and unintelligent for so long, so childish, crass or whatever else that your "general audience" will only accept such. You've diluted them to such an extent where anything that would require the audience to think about something, they'd shut off.

Either way I'd like to see some attempts at something a tad more intelligent than what we've had. Take stereotypes and turn them on their head. We know Vince likes satire... no reason why that can't be half-decent, clever satire as opposed to dumb and stupid shit.

A big story in the British papers over the last few days has been a professional football (/soccer) player punching a girl in a club and going to jail. Naturally he's been demonised in the press. He has various prior convictions, he's "overpaid" (ie in relation to the national average rather than his share of the money in his profession); just about everyone who I've tried to play Devil's Advocate to has wondered why I'd think otherwise than the aforementioned (the reality being I'm totally apathetic and merely trying to make the conversation less mundane in work).

But it got me thinking... every "man fights woman" scenario is based on sexism. That is, "women should be in the kitchen and the bedroom". Why not run the angle as you normally would, the heel protagonist is attacking women, only have him as a die-hard feminist who truly believes in equality across every domain and (from his perspective) portray the crowd as the bad guys for being "sexist" towards the woman because they wouldn't be half as objectioned if it was men he was beating up.

Segueing to other ideas... I can't help but think that an atheist gimmick would go down a treat in heavilly-religious areas. Now initially you think that's too far for cheap heat... only instead you have him (or her) make the intelligensia's argument for atheism and take your cues from "The God Delusion" or something similar.

Maybe have an Anti-(home country) heel whose making genuine and fair points on that particularly countries history and/or culture (albeit from what we'd call a heelish stand-point). I guess that's similar to what Bret morphed into in 1997, but really go to school on it.

Or a guy who turns the "family-friendly morality tale" nature of wrestling onto the crowd. You can casually drop a (planned) accidental "fuck" into a promo. Then when you get in trouble... go after the censors and morph it into a rant on over-protective parenting, how "any genuinely considerate parent would bring their children up to speed with the real way the world works and not try and comfort them with silly morality tales that makes the final, sudden realisation for them when they grow up all the more difficult". Or something.

My personal favourite from a while ago was actually a reverse Dusty Rhodes. Whereby the "working class hero" from humble beginnings doesn't care for the audience, isn't trying to inspire anyone, his journey to that point has reared him cold and focused solely on himself, hates the crowds affection for him because their own inability to have made anything with their lives despite being born into far less humble beginnings than he/she was makes him/her sick. Indeed, you can morph into the previous one about families from the same subject.

Now I'm hardly saying these are particularly clever or anything (I'm not a professional television writer so go figure) but I'd like heels who have strong, genuine, thought-out points behind their rants. They might even engineer some genuine, real-life hatred. None of this "it's all a show (let's play along)" fan heat like wrestling meets Brecht or something. God I hate that.

Anyway...