On the latest episode of My World, Jeff Jarrett looked back at how TNA reinvented itself for its Spike TV debut, building the launch around his Planet Jarrett heel faction with Chris Harris, James Storm, and Gail Kim. You can check out his comments below:
“When we knew we were going to do a deal — the Spike executive, a guy named Jim Burns, said, hey, I’ve just left the office, we want to do business together — that’s when we all got in the room creatively and said, all right, how do we come on Spike? It’s a new chapter. The Fox Sports chapter was over. We won a summer essentially with no TV, Raven was champion, and we got in the room creatively. That’s when Planet Jarrett was going to be created. We switched the title up in Canada to me, and we wanted to come on the air as Planet Jarrett. I knew my role, but Chris and James, the younger guys, and Gail Kim — that’s what we presented right out of the gate: the heel faction, me as the single, them as the tags, Gail. We didn’t have the Knockouts division yet, but that’s what we put forward, day one on Spike. The numbers speak for themselves. It took off, the ratings were great in that Saturday night time slot, and those guys were the anchor of the tag team division through that whole run.”
“My philosophy is heels draw money. I wanted to come on Spike with the heels with the belts — the Dudleys weren’t in the thought process or the equation. It was me, Chris, James, and Gail coming on as the antagonists. That’s how we were starting the Spike story. I remember meeting at a TGI Fridays right across from Universal Studios, me and Frank Dickerson sitting with Bubba and D-Von about them coming on board. Bubba thinks things through. If you’re around Bubba, you may think, oh man, he’s selfish — Bubba takes care of Bubba, D-Von takes care of D-Von, but at the end of the day, they came in and said, this tag team division is only going to go as high as you can get the heels. They understood that mentality. These guys let us put them through tables, we laid out all kinds of crazy stuff, and they knew where they were at in their careers: we’re going to get ours back, but to get it back, we’ve really got to make these guys assholes — and they did. Bubba and D-Von were thinking the long game. They knew they’d come into the brand and have a honeymoon period as babyfaces, so let’s milk that as long as we can. That’s businessmen thinking.”