Low television viewership for AEW Rampage seemingly led to the creation of a new faction in the company

During an appearance on Chris Jericho’s podcast, QT Marhshall talked about his transition from The Factory faction to his current QTV group…

“We did an episode of Rampage that was the lowest-drawing Rampage of all-time. I was (in the main event). I will say this, the main event did really well, but it was just overall, a very poorly-rated Rampage and Tony (Khan) called me. He said, ‘Hey, I think you’re not presented as a huge star and then you’re not leading a bunch of stars so maybe it’s time to disband. Let’s come up with a new idea’ and someone pitched ‘Just Joe’, from WWE, you know? So I was like, ah man, I don’t wanna be another joke. I wanna do something fun. I just said, ‘What can we come up with?’ And then Tony said, ‘Have you ever seen the movie Popstar?’ And I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Well if you look at it, they make fun of TMZ…’ So he showed me the clip and he loved the clip and I said, ‘Okay’ and this was all supposed to be, at the end, the payoff was going to be that it was all good stuff about Will Hobbs. We bury everybody else and it would end up that I was with Powerhouse Hobbs. That’s what was supposed to start. But then when the Wardlow match happened, everything just kind of got… It was Hobbs versus Wardlow in Hobbs’ hometown, in San Francisco so it was like, ‘What do we do?’ And then it was kind of, ‘Q.T! We’re gonna put you with him now.’ I was like, ‘Okay. Yeah, let’s do it,’ you know? So then we had to kind of go backwards and (Aaron) Solo’s always been Solo so he’s someone I can count on, he’s professional, and when we originally thought about using the other guys, it was like, ‘We need a female. Who can we get?’ And a couple names came up and I spoke to a couple different people and I just remembered Harley (Cameron) from doing Dark and the music stuff and I was like, man, she just seems like a lot of personality. So I talked to Tony and Tony was like, ‘Yeah, let’s give it a shot’ so we were gonna film a bunch of vignettes and just without any contracts or anything like that and then all of a sudden, this thing just happened so it was like, ‘Hey, you start on TV next week.’” (quote courtesy of PostWrestling.com)