Category: Wrestling Television Musings

RAW (June 7th, 2010) – Declaring WAR On The Three-Hour RAW

So last night, WWE introduced their three-hour Viewers’ Choice RAW. And I’d have to say that that should have been a warning that nothing interesting or remotely good was going to happen. Some of you might recall this experiment having been done before in the form of the brief Taboo Tuesday/Cyber Sunday series of Pay-Per-Views… yeah, they actually charged money for the same concept that was given away for free. Morons.

Whatever…

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RAW (May 24th, 2010) – Bret Hart new GM… hooray.

Last night’s RAW was pretty pedestrian… so much so that I missed the main event match with the incredibly obvious ending (Edge pinning Jericho while Cena does nothing). But to be fair, there were some highlights here and there. So some quick comments:

– Batista (predictably) quits WWE… such a sad note to leave the company at.

– Bret Hart is YOUR new RAW General Manager… WHAT?!!! Okay, I was surprised there, but I don’t see this lasting long. Probably up until they manage to score the Rock or something.

– Bret decides to hold qualifying matches for the upcoming Fatal Four Way PPV. Without mentioning the matches themselves (one sucked, another didn’t happen, and the last one I didn’t see), the main event features Cena, Orton, Sheamus, and Edge. Hey, just like the wrestling sites said it would be. So much for THAT bit of misinformation, guys.

– R-Truth is YOUR new WWE United States champion after beating Miz in a pretty decent match. I know I paid attention for the most part, so that’s a good sign if there ever was one. Oh, by the way, this match could have easily happened last week when Miz was the champion and thus not requiring Bret Hart to win the title. But at least Bret didn’t compete in another match.

– Michael Cole threatens to sue Daniel Bryan Danielson if he doesn’t give Cole a proper public apology. Oh yeah, I can’t wait to see that one… on DailyMotion. (Sorry, YouTube. When it comes to the really good shit, you just ain’t got it.)

– Samoans take out the Canadians after they dominated the Russian and English tag-team. If you figure any of that out, you get a cookie.

– The less said about Jon Lovitz’s skit, the better…

– John Cena cuts a promo – time to change the channel.

Not really much to say, but in any case… that’s it for me.

Coming soon… the 100th Post of Twisted Blog. Looking to work something in there soon. Until then, folks.

RAW (May 17th, 2010) – Sure Glad They’re Pushing That Young Bret Hart Fellow…

Getting to watch the RAW replay (still with commercials and thus with significant chunks missing), I actually found the show to be a nice little average show, which is about a step about the usual below-average stuff they crap out.

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IMPACT (May 13th, 2010) – Back Where They Belong

So, if you haven’t checked out my spoiler thoughts, do so here.

I will give TNA a sliver of credit – their first Thursday show since tapping out on Mondays turned out to be a better show than I was expecting and certainly not as horrifying as I had initially believed after reading the spoilers. It’s not a particularly good show – let’s not go crazy in our limited praise – but obviously, the advantages of being a taped show means you get to edit the bullshit and bring it down to a tolerable level.

Sadly, it’s still TNA. And there’s still plenty of bullshit to be had here.

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RAW (May 10th, 2010) – Meatloaf RKOed, Bryan gets a WIN, Miz challenges Bret, and I Quit

So last night’s RAW show was so RAW-ful that I didn’t even watch the 9:00 showing. So what could I have been doing since there was no longer a TNA Impact on the opposite end of the tube? Well, that’s easy. I divided my time between watching the Pittsburg/Montreal playoff game and playing me some Blades of Steel… old-school. However, I did catch the midnight replay (The Score airs RAW a couple times after the 9:00, including a Tuesday afternoon 4:00 PM replay) and managed to stay awake for an hour before recording the rest… which I saw this morning. Overall, this is a meh show with few matches. Funny how that works.

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IMPACT (May 3rd, 2010) – The Monday Night Pillow Fight Comes To A Whimpering End

Well, it’s over.

After just nine weeks, Total Nonstop Action has thrown in the towel on their fruitless Monday Night Pillow Fight and are returning to their usual Thursday night timeslot starting next week. I’ve already seen the spoilers for that show and it looks like it’s going to be business as usual. But at least, I got to see their last Monday show…

And I kinda wish that I hadn’t.

Let’s get the good bits out of the way; the opening segment where Jay Lethal was doing the whole Ric Flair spiel (and quite frankly a phenomenal job of it too) and Ric Flair coming out to confront Lethal was tremendous. Honestly, if Jay Lethal ever gets out of wrestling, he should do impressions for a living because he has a natural talent for that sort of thing. In fact, if Impact was nothing but Jay Lethal doing wrestler impersonations for two hours every week, I’m sure the ratings would’ve improved overnight and trumped RAW.

Unfortunately, the rest of the show was a thing. The usual brand of good matches running short and with usually shit finishes. Eric Young joining Hall & Nash to form the 19,960,707th edition of the nWo… er, I mean, THE BAND, is baffling to me and I’m not sure it’s going to last… didn’t Nash beat the shit out of Young some time ago or am I misremembering things? RVD/Nigel… er, I mean, DESMOND WOLFE, seemed like it could’ve been a fun match had it not been cut short. Some stuff with Sting and Hogan…

I find myself watching this show and fast-forwarding on the recording to get to the good bits. I couldn’t find any good bits and the bits that could’ve been good ended before it got good. Even so, from what I saw, this was not a good Impact and gave me the impression that TNA not only tapped out on Monday Nights, but was also crying uncle in a very whiny voice.

So long, Monday IMPACT. It’s been a fun ride… I guess… or maybe not.

Can’t wait for this Thursday show… if I can catch it.

RAW (Apr. 26th, 2010) – Shaking Things Up By Doing Fuck All

Saw the three hour RAW and… it was okay. Not much to say about the actual show itself. The only thing of significance is that the Hart Dynasty won the Unified Tag Titles and Big Show punched Miz out. Also, Bret Hart declared The Mountie as the greatest Intercontinental champion of all time… which I’m sure makes Honky happy to hear. Then again, I’m surprised Bret didn’t declare himself the greatest IC champ, but whatever.

The draft on the other hand… oh dear.

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IMPACT (April 26th, 2010) – Well, That Didn’t Last…

Well, last week, I praised Impact on a far better show than their usual outing and figured – quite foolishly, in hindsight – that things were turning around and maybe TNA might have a chance at producing a quality show going forward. They’d pretty much have to, right?

Well, sadly, that didn’t happen. Maybe it just wasn’t meant to be.

The main event saw Ric Flair lose to Abyss, following an teased finish in which Flair struck Abyss with brass knuckles and scored the pin. Unfortunately for the former multi-time world champion, TNA assigned one of the smart referees who spotted the knux, managed to put two-and-two together, and got into a shoving match with Flair before restarting the match, allowing Abyss to win. The match itself is… a thing that happened.

However, the stipulation in this match was that whoever lost the match would have to give up their WWE Hall Of Fame ring, which meant that Ric Flair would have to surrender his ring to Abyss. Flair cries foul, but out comes Hogan to rip the ring off Flair’s finger. This is the top angle in TNA, kids; everybody is fighting over Hall Of Fame rings from another promotion. My brain hurts.

The rest of the show… you know, I’d wish I could comment, but that main event and the feud over the rings has broken my brain to such a degree that I simply can’t be bothered to remember what the fuck happened beforehand. That’s how bad this was.

RAW (Apr. 19th, 2010): MacGruber is guilty of manslaughter

Maybe the RAW crew being stranded in Europe is a good thing. Last night’s RAW was a nice change of pace and ended up being a pretty good show overall. Yeah, color me surprised. TNA Impact pulls out a wonderful effort (for once) and RAW invaded by Smackdown turns out to be a much better show than it had any right to be. As much as the three of you would like to have seen a 2-hour Ironman match between Triple H and Lillian Garcia (came back for one night only – welcome back, Lil!), what we got was actually better than that.

HHH got beat up by CM Punk’s posse. Think about that for a minute – HHH on the weak end of a skit. That rarely happens on RAW these days. And the six-man tag-team main-event that followed… a nice change of pace. HHH won, sure, but he had to win in this case – he’s the only RAW guy there.

The MacGruber bits… some might find awful and unfunny, but I’ll admit that I got a couple laughs out of it. I find no amusement in the fact that he blew up Ron Killings, but other than that, it was good, clean pee-pee fun.

Undertaker beat Jack Swagger in a really good match. Yeah, not too happy about the guy who’s the World Heavyweight Champion losing all that often, but still it was a pretty good and actually entertaining match. You’d rarely get something like that on RAW these days.

Heck, there’s even a good match between the IC Champ Drew McIntyre and Matt Hardy… well, nowhere near as good as RVD/Jeff Hardy, but hey… they didn’t make me want to take a break, so they earned marks.

So yeah… all in all, good show.

IMPACT: (Apr. 19th, 2010) – What a great IMPACT that was… wait. IMPACT?!!

Against my better judgment, I saw TNA Impact… and holy hot damn. This is actually a good show. I mean, seriously. What the fuck happened? Just last week, I watched five seconds of a show that made me shake my head in disgust and stick with the complacent RAW. This week, I find myself constantly switching between RAW and Impact just to see what happens next. I think I might actually go ahead and catch the replay this coming Thursday to watch the whole thing, because from the bits I saw in the second hour… Impact pulled off one of their best shows… well, ever.

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