From an interview with Ring-Rap:
"I just feel like having a monthly pay-per-view just tends to burn through storylines so quickly. There's always the argument, the criticism that TNA does too many things on each wrestling show, and I think there's some truth to that, and I believe that if we were to scale back the number of pay-per-views, that character development would be a lot smoother, that people could have these wide ranging arcs the way that Ricky Steamboat and Jake Roberts were able to feud for six months."
I was talking with Jason Mann, who runs Wrestlespective, on Twitter last night about just this very thing. When was the last time we saw a slow build? Undertaker and HBK got about 4 months worth for their rematch at WrestleMania but that was for a career ender for Michaels. I asked Jason if we're ever going to see a build the likes of what we got with Sting and Hulk Hogan back in 1997 and he doesn't think so. He says the Taker-HBK build is likely as good as it's going to get.
I'm not saying they have to do a really long program like they did with Sting and Hogan/nWo. As Jason said to me on Twitter, that was unprecedented even for that time. But the fact of the matter is that I can't remember looking foward to a wrestling match as much as I looked forward to the Hogan-Sting match at Starrcade. They did everything right with that angle all the way up to the match. The match itself was an unmitigated disaster but that doesn't diminish how great everything was that came before it.
Something the Sting-Hogan feud also brings to light is the fact that, unlike what Foley believes, you can have monthly pay-per-views while still developing long ranging storylines. It just takes a serious commitment from the writers, something we rarely see in professional wrestling anymore. Remember Vince Russo commenting that he was writing out storylines on napkins 3 hours before big shows? It's that kind of mentality that leads to the short-sighted booking we get on a weekly basis that draws no interest for PPV's down the road. If Taker is going to retire at Mania next year then they need to start building towards that now. Having him in another program with Kane isn't going to move the needle. It's high time to start giving some of these stories the attention they deserve.