Monday Night Raw is one of the longest-running weekly episodic television shows of all time. Throughout it’s run it has seen a fair number of changes in the commentary booth. Legends such as Jim Ross and Jerry ‘The King’ Lawler have been part of the commentary table. Now, the two people who have taken control of the Monday Night Show are Wade Barrett and Joe Tessitore. NXT Commentator Vic Joseph was also a part of the Raw Commentary table once.
While speaking on the Cheap Heat Podcast with Pete Rosenberg, Vic Joseph shared his experience working on Monday Nights.
“And then I got the call to do Monday Night Raw and I will say because a lot of people talk about my time on Raw and it was short. If I didn’t have that experience and Rose, you’ll know this more than a lot of people listening, if I didn’t have that failure, I would not have known how to succeed and so with that, coming back in 2020 with NXT, I’ve been in the seat ever since.
“I have felt that every year, I’ve gotten better and I do feel that it’s my home. It’s, for a lack of a better phrase, my show. You listen to SmackDown, you think Michael Cole, you think Joe Tessitore (on Raw). I don’t think I’ve ever been, no matter what show I did, thought of in that way. Thought of, oh! That’s Vic’s show. Oh, Michael Cole’s on, Tess is on or Corey Graves is on and I feel that now.” [H/T POST Wrestling]
Vic Joseph: I look at it as a failure
Joseph shared that his stint on Raw was a failure but still thanks Paul Heyman for giving him the opportunity.
“I look at it (Raw commentary stint) as a failure because if it wasn’t a failure, I’d still be doing the show. That’s how I look at it and so, I didn’t do my job and because I didn’t do my job up to the ability of certain individuals, they had to make a decision. I thank Paul Heyman for giving me that opportunity. I just saw Paul recently at Raw and we always go back-and-forth and I always pick his brain but he always tells me, ‘You didn’t fail.’ Every time I see him, he goes, ‘Hey, just remember, you didn’t fail. It just was a bad situation.’ I look at it a little bit differently because I’m always a little bit harder on myself.
“But man, I can tell you if you go back and listen to 2019 Vic Joseph and you listen to 2024 Vic Joseph, it is night and frickin’ day, because when I was doing Raw, I couldn’t handle doing a graphic and a transition and getting back into the calling the match and I was working with Jerry Lawler, at the time, who’s seen it all and it was moving so fast. You were talking about football. (Jayden) Daniels is the quarterback for the (Washington) Commanders. It’s slowed down already for him. But man, when I got in there, I was like that number one pick, and everything was moving so fast and I just wasn’t doing fundamentals.”
I was out of my comfort zone
“I was out of my comfort zone and to get taken from that show and to do what I’m doing now, I do all the graphics, I do all the transitions, I do all the kicks, I do all the sends and all that and that is by design and that (is) what I’ve taken the most from it is people listening go, ‘Man, that’s smooth. You’ve gotten so much better.’ I had to or I wouldn’t be here and then that’s just the honest to God’s truth about it and so I took a lot from that Raw run that-that had to happen for me to get to where I am now. It had to happen,” Vic Joseph said. [H/T POST Wrestling]
Are you happy to see Vic Joseph on NXT?
