Category: Wrestling Television Musings

The reasoning for this is two-fold; the first being that I’ve got quite a bit to say and I want to give the thing a couple final looks before posting. The second reason being that I was curious to see how your usual Monday night brand of “shit happening” would respond to a PPV offering from a new upstart rival promotion that, for all intents and purposes, has gotten rave reviews and praise.

I’ll go ahead and spoil things for you… they responded by teasing a fatal-four way match for their Red Belt championship and ultimately had the thing won by Baron Corbin, who was a replacement for AJ Styles who was forced out due to injury. And by the way, this took place in the dreaded “third hour” of RAW… the RAW that one Michael Foley said was going to be more gritty. If “more gritty” is code for “more Baron Corbin,” then it’s a good thing I skipped on this one.

Actually, you want to know how much of a non-issue this is to WWE? They opened the show with Kofi Kingston – your current WORLD CHAMPION, by the way – coming out with a plate of pancakes… this after a rival promotion held a PPV that featured a bloody brother vs. brother affair as well as the debut of a wrestler that was once one of their most prominent stars.

Whatever, man.

I’m not going to say a whole lot about this show… and truth be told, I’ve only seen the opening promo and the main event rematch between Kofi and Bryan. Everything else in between has been skippable for the most part and quite frankly, not all that interesting. I don’t care about the Lacey Evans thing, I don’t care about the Sami Zayn thing, I thought the business he had with Braun and the dumpster was fucking stupid without even watching it because everything Braun does these days is full of stupid, and, well, I guess Baron Corbin is still a thing they’re trying to push because of course he is.

But I do want to bring up this “Wild Card” thing, which apparently means guys from RAW and Smackdown can invade each others shows, thereby negating this whole Superstar Shakedown or whatever they’re calling it and rendering it a complete waste of time. If you have guys jumping between both shows on a regular basis, why even both with a bland sprit? And then they wonder why people are tuning out in droves.

I’ve said this on a board somewhere, but I’ll repost here because it’s worth mentioning: They need new creative, not new talent. Bottom line.

They already have all the talent they need. The problem isn’t with the talent. You can have all the talent in the world and have them appear on fifty shows a week, but if they’re subjected to the same lousy, dilapidated creative that has killed talent in the past, it’s not going to mean a damn thing in the long run. People need a reason to care about what’s going on screen; a reason to get emotionally invested in the storylines you’re presenting.

That’s not happening here and that’s why there’s been a steady decline over the years. Why should I care about brand splits, drafts, superstar shakeups, or whatever if you’re just going to come up with a stupid gimmick that renders all that irrelevant?

An entirely new creative approach with consistent storytelling (not to mention a bit of continuity) is what’s going to make things fresh, not a bunch of random new faces that are going to get lost in the shuffle because nobody can figure out what to do with them.

As for the Kofi/Bryan match… it was alright. Probably not as good as their Mania match, but that’s okay. For a RAW main event, it was perfectly acceptable fare. I enjoyed it for the most part.

Beyond that, however… no buys.