Booker T Wanted To Talk About Independent Wrestling On WWE Backstage To Improve The Show's Ratings

In late June, FS1 announced they were scaling back production on WWE Backstage along with other programming. The show has reportedly been all but cancelled as the TV network thought they were spending too much money on a show that wasn't drawing big ratings.

Despite regularly featuring stars like CM Punk, Booker T and Christian, the show often failed to attract more than 100,000 viewers.

Booker T recently discussed WWE Backstage's demise on the After The Bell podcast and revealed he wanted to improve ratings by talking about independent wrestling as he hoped this would attract wrestling fans beyond "the casual WWE viewer."

The six-time world champion said: "I wanted to talk about independent wrestling, and that's what I really wanted to talk about. I knew it was called WWE Backstage but we could've talked about, you know, certain guys out there that were good enough to talk about and people knew that brought relevance to their product… I thought there was so much out there that we were missing from a newsworthy perspective. And I just think doing something like that would have drew more eyes on the show.

"Like, my thing was I was always worried weekly just because, you know, the ratings wasn’t what I wanted. I said, you know, with my star power and all the rest of the guys on the panel, our star power together, we should have had no less than 500,000 viewers per week. That should have been the low number for us. And for me, I don't think there was enough thought going into something like that. Everyone was just, 'F**k, we've got to get those numbers up.' And I thought stuff like that would intrigue not just the casual WWE viewer, but people that's really thinking about, 'Man, what is this business really truly all about?'"