About 19 hours later, they were gone, having mounted and performed a show with the volume and pyrotechnics of a rock concert, the broadcast complexity of an NFL playoff and fan zealotry that equaled or exceeded either.Įach week, the TV operation reconstitutes itself in a market early Monday to prepare for that evenings's two-hour live broadcast of WWE's biggest program, 'Raw,' as well as to tape other matches for that week's 'WWE Superstars.' (Though 'Raw' and 'SmackDown' talent and technicians travel different tours for live shows, they share a TV crew.)īy Tuesday morning, as the 'Raw' folks continue on their live-shows tour, the TV team meets the 'SmackDown' tour in another city, getting ready to entertain a screaming crowd of thousands and a presumably quieter TV audience of millions, finishing in the wee hours of Wednesday. The WWE 'SmackDown' convoy - 12 tractor-trailers, 14 cast and crew buses, more than 150 people - descended on the TU Center around 8 a.m.

The evening had begun with matches taped for inclusion on Thursday's 'WWE Superstars,' shown on WGN America. Another full show, 'WWE NXT,' featuring rookie performers, aired live on the Syfy network beginning at 10 p.m. One of the episodes taped Tuesday, 'SmackDown,' featuring a confrontation between a pair of fearsome, clashing-titan brothers named The Undertaker and Kane, will air tonight on MyNetworkTV. Balancing concerns about long-term storylines with immediate decisions about what take to use momentarily, Dunn surveyed the monitors, watching live feeds from inside the arena, pretaped segments and material from the previous night that had been delivered by satellite. Murmuring into a headset, his eyes scanned the busy monitors. On Tuesday, in a truck full of people in polo shirts and shorts, Dunn wore a pinstripe suit jacket. Kevin Dunn, executive producer of all of the company's programming and a 26-year employee, still supervises shows on the road from this room. The brain of the broadcast, deep within the video truck and connected to another TV truck and the arena by fiber-optic cables and to WWE headquarters by satellite, is a room with more than 20 32-inch high-def TVs. The show was in town to entertain a crowd of 6,000 for three and a half hours during an evening that TV audiences would see as two full shows and part of a third. He sat facing a bank of high-definition monitors, each divided into multiple picture-in-picture segments, in a state-of-the-art TV-production truck that was parked behind the Times Union Center in Albany on Tuesday night. 'If NASCAR is the First Infantry, we're the Navy SEALS,' said Dave Taylor, a senior tape operator for WWE TV broadcasts.

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