I think it's time we had a talk, WWE. I feel that the direction we're heading in is the wrong direction. Things have gotten stale over the past few months, and frankly, I'm giving you a lot more than what you're giving me. We're not on equal footing anymore. You used to give me a lot more than I could hope for, but now you only seem satisfied to give me the bare minimum. It also seems like you want us to go backwards and not forwards. I know you're trying to throw things in there to spice up our relationship, but they're just not working for me. I know you think you're doing the right thing so that I'll love you again, but you're not. And I've been giving you so many chances to make things right.
So we're going to have to not see each other for a while. It's not me, WWE: it's you.
I'm not going to lie to you people. I am not enjoying WWE main roster shows as a whole right now, and as you can tell from my last few weeks of columns, you can see that it's only getting worse. And there's a lot of things that could be pointed to for causing this level disdain and disillusion; you could point to the horrible storylines they keep trying to manufacture our interest in, you could point to the terrible 50/50 booking in a lot of matches, you could point to the lack of really interesting matches, you could point to the hyper-saturation of Shane McMahon, but the reality of the situation is that no matter how awful the product can get at one point or another, there's something that gives you the tiniest sliver of hope and that's what fucks you in the end and I can't live like that anymore.
Two weeks back, I made two bold statements and they were as follows: if they didn't debut either Bray Wyatt or Aleister Black that week, I was basically just going to tap out for a while and take a break from the main roster and just enjoy watching NXT programming.
Instead I got The Undertaker helping Roman Reigns against Shane McMahon and Drew McIntyre for absolutely no reason whatsoever, and then got a "reason" in that he wants to collect Shane and Drew's souls. I got Sami Zayn taking more pinfalls. I was treated to this new "We're not going to interrupt the actual match for commercials" programming concept and this turned every match into something extremely brief or something that started as a one-on-one and was turned into a two-on-two or a four-on-four or a two out of three falls match. I got the setup for a mixed tag match between real-life couple Seth Rollins and Becky Lynch vs real-life non-couple Baron Corbin and Lacey Evans to likely headline Extreme Rules. I got more "we're making matches for the next PPV and announcing them weeks beforehand rather than allowing an actual story to develop". I got Kofi working his ass off and quite possible suffering a little burnout on that end as well. I got Ricochet losing clean to A.J. Styles the night after he won the US title. I got Ember Moon losing in about 90 seconds to Sonya Deville and watching a potentially queer-baiting storyline between Sonya and Mandy. I got Alexa Bliss beating Naomi in about 90 seconds. I got more Heyman teasing Brock Lesnar appearing. This is not even getting into the madness of the Stomping Grounds main event. Then we haven't even mentioned the Twitter war that went on between Seth Rollins and Will Ospreay this past week or the things that Seth had to say aboutDean Ambrose Jon Moxley on some podcast either. Look, I get that Seth is a company man. He's in favor of his product over everyone else's. And as the Universal Champion, he has a responsibility to downplay other performers in other promotions as well as talk up the product he's a top guy in. The podcast comments about Mox "taking his ball and going home" is all Vince, so let's just leave it there. And the war of words between Rollins and Ospreay has stopped and all it's done is made Rollins look like kind of a jerk, Ospreay look like the cool guy, and gave him a new idea for some merch he's now selling on ProWrestlingTees.com. So good on ya, Will! And Seth, when you've had a match one-fifth of the quality of Ospreay's over the last year, get back to us, okay? And that's just been the last two weeks.
This week was the introduction of a "new" era, as Vince made Paul Heyman and Eric Bischoff the titles of "Executive Director" of Raw and Smackdown respectively. Raw started and ended bold and they started no talky promos and got to a Falls Count Anywhere match between Bobby Lashley and Braun Strowman who, after beating the shit out of one another, Strowman speared Lashley through the LED board on the stage creating a shower of electrical sparks and arcs that seemed like an accident and elicited a "Holy Shit!" from Corey Graves, and then ended the show with A.J. Styles turning heel on Ricochet at the urging of Gallows and Anderson and the reformation of The Club looking to reclaim dominance. If all these things happened in a vacuum, this would be a pretty awesome episode. But it wasn't. It's the same garbage but wrapped in a prettier bow. I know they certainly weren't going to abandon the bullshit storylines that are not working for me. What the fuck was the cucking angle they're going for with Maria and Mike Kanellis? Why are they working Becky and Seth's real-life relationship so hard, and why are they going along with it? And why are they bringing up Street Profits now? Let them have some more good times on NXT before they do this! The only other thing that worked for me was Samoa Joe getting Kofi to take the first loss he's had since before Wrestlemania. I know that whatever match they end up having for Styles and Ricochet as well as Joe and Kofi will be great on a PPV, but I'm going to wait until then to watch them. I'm sure I'll catch recaps.
Smackdown... didn't really feel different at all this week. Aside from the fact that Kevin Owens does the best mic work on a weekly basis than pretty much anyone in all the WWE, there wasn't anything to write home about that episode either. A complete absence of Finn and Shinsuke, 50/50 booking for Bayley and Nikki Cross, Aleister Black asking his still-unknown opponent to show up at Extreme Rules, Samoa Joe getting the finger from Kofi, and Daniel Bryan being an old-school heel. It was a real slog to get through and it just ended up feeling like it was treading water.
So this should be it, right? It's hardly a nail in the coffin for WWE, but it's starting to feel like they've just... given up. They're not even really trying to keep us invested. Bringing back Undertaker feels like exactly what it is: a cheap way they can try to get older fans to tune in in the hopes it'll give a much-needed ratings bump and to try to sell more tickets for Extreme Rules so they don't suffer the tremendously poor attendance of Stomping Grounds again. So I'm out. There aren't enough performers getting stories on the main roster that I'm invested in. The only things that are actually working for me are the Alexa Bliss/Nikki Cross story (even if it's antithetical to the character Nikki created), and the ongoing saga of the 24/7 Championship and how R-Truth has proven to us all that he's the true MVP of WWE's main roster programming right now. Seth, Becky, Kofi, D-Bry, Roman... none of them can hold a candle to watching Truth weaving gold out of the potential dumpster fire that is the 24/7 title. As far as the more "extreme" elements, you can feel the wheels turning that they're trying to get back the coveted 18-35 bracket by doing something "edgy", like what they did with Strowman/Lashley and Kofi Kingston flipping the bird at his opponent. You can feel that they're trying to get back to the Attitude Era, and I am not here for that. I'm not here to watch a company devolve back to "edgier" content in order to try to get more young people to watch.
And another part of the problem is that I'm sick of grading main roster shows on a curve. I know that the prevailing excuse is, "well, you try writing 52 weeks of programming for 200 different wrestlers every week". I couldn't do that because I wouldn't try to do that. And if it's so fucking hard, why do you do it? Don't you think that WWE might be better if they gave their talent some time off for a few months like they do with other shows, give them time to rest and heal up, still do some house shows, and skip over these lame-ass PPVs like Stomping Grounds or Extreme Rules or literally any Saudi show and come back fresh with planned story arcs and some tighter storytelling? Or does that make too much sense? The only PPV's that should be actual events are the four main ones, Money In The Bank, Hell In A Cell and that's pretty much it. It's not like they're making big money off the PPVs since most people who watch them have the Network anyway, and the main source of their income isn't the people who attend the PPVs anyway.
And going back to grading it on a curve, the problem is that when it's even just marginally better than it usually is, people start raving about it. I saw people on Twitter this week calling Raw a "bold and fresh beginning to a new era" and "the best Raw in months if not years", and I'm clearly not watching the same show these people were. I'm still seeing the Matrix code of desperation within these shows and they're just not landing for me. Everything is short-term. You can't tell me that the seeds of A.J.'s heel turn have been planted for weeks and months. They decided three weeks ago that A.J. was going to do this. I'm just fed up with it.
Every fan seems to go through what I call the "Lapsed Catholic" period. You worshiped at the altar of this particular church because you had faith, but there comes a time for so many of us where faith just isn't enough and you require something tangible. If only one prayer could be answered, your faith would be rewarded and restored. We go through that with virtually every type of entertainment. If you're watching a TV series, reading a series of books, watching a film franchise, reading a comic book, or listening to a particular band and the quality is just... well, it's just not doing it for you any longer. So it's time to take a break, right? Just let things run their course and return when you're interested in something enough to spend your valuable time with this product, or at least wait until someone you trust says it's time to come back, and it makes it easier when there are wrestling programs I can watch that not only have earned my trust and devotion, but have rewarded it.
NXT is pretty much the perfect wrestling show for me. I've been following it for a long time now (I don't go all the way back but I do go back to when Finn was champ and lost his championship to Samoa Joe at a fucking house show, which had to be a Triple H bucket list thing), and it just has everything I love: long-form storytelling, interesting/fun/smart characters with actual character arcs, tremendously entertaining matches, and when their major events happen, they feel really important. No TakeOver I've ever seen really feels like, "Oh, well, this was just a match they could have had on an episode of the weekly show". These are matches that generally have the right amount of build-up, and end up quite often being something really breathtaking to behold. I know that all the Meltzer 5-Star matches generally go to all the New Japan matches, but I was glad that he finally caught on when he gave NXT its first 5-Star match grade for the Johnny Gargano/Andrade "Cien" Almas match for the NXT title at TakeOver: Philadelphia in 2017. NXT UK isn't there yet. It still feels a bit like they're still testing the waters to see which stars people latch onto so a really significant story hasn't been told yet, but they're getting there. It's a work in progress and this must probably feel like what the beginnings of the current incarnation of NXT felt like when it started.
And then there's also New Japan. Thanks to whatever happened between AXS TV and New Japan as far as securing their TV rights to broadcast the events much faster rather than waiting a month or more to catch up, we're able to see things maybe a week or so after they happened. For example, this weekend, we were treated to the opening of the G1 Climax where we had some really strong matches that were all really fun and dramatic to watch. I'm not following all the stories, but I'm here for most of them. And it's the only place I can watch Will Ospreay, who is one of my favorites. Although New Japan is not without its problems. First of all, no women's division. Second of all, they might be a little too dangerous with their talent from time to time. Obviously the most recent example of this is the Kota Ibushi/Tetsuya Naito match at Dominion where Ibushi's face bounced off the apron in a truly shocking and disturbing fashion, but they've also had a performer literally die in the ring. It wasn't recent, but I do think that New Japan needs to handle this kind of thing better. I want every single performer to be able to live to a ripe old age and not die in their forties or fifties because of massive brain hemorrhaging or their bodies just fail. It's sad when a wrestler passes away in their seventies and people talk about it like that's a surprising age for a wrestler to pass away.
What am I forgetting? It seems like there's this other promotion that everyone's talking about...
All Elite Wrestling is built on a very solid foundation and really feels fresh and exciting. I didn't watch Double or Nothing because it is kind of hard to justify spending $50 on a PPV unless you're having a viewing party where everyone's kicking in a few bucks, but thankfully Fyter Fest was free to watch in North America, and as it turns out, so will their upcoming PPV, Fight for the Fallen. And that's this upcoming weekend! Fyter Fest was a bit of a mixed bag (unprotected chair shots to the head should be an absolute no-no in 2019), but mostly very entertaining. Plus they have a roster that really feels unique, so when their weekly show starts up in the fall, I'm already waiting with bated breath for a number of reasons. First, this just seems like it'll be a strong alternative to WWE main roster stuff. Second, and maybe more importantly, it might just cause WWE to have to actually improve their main roster offerings. Although as I stated earlier, it feels like instead of going forward to make their brand more accessible, they're trying to go backwards to a time where they were the only ones really being talked about as far as pro wrestling was concerned.
It would be unfair to say that WWE's only problem is Vincent Kennedy McMahon, but it would be fair to to say he's certainly their biggest problem. After all, he runs this shit. And the problem with him having absolute power is that men in their 70's tend to not be the most, well, accepting of the current zeitgeist surrounding pro wrestli... ahem, excuse me... sports entertainment, and they will always believe that they know best because they've made the most money at it, and that sentiment right there is indicative of American exceptionalism at its most grotesque. Vince believes he's the best because he's the most wealthy, but there isn't a one of us who should ever believe that money equals genius. And we've all seen the John Oliver piece by now, so yes, we know how shitty the culture at WWE can be. The modern analog to indentured servitude, the lack of health insurance, the union-busting, the racism, sexism, ableism, etc., and it would be great to have all that end. And there are advocates for that on the inside. John Cena refused to work last year's Saudi show, Crown Jewel, and Daniel Bryan refused to work both that show and the recent Super Showdown. And like CM Punk's pipe-bomb promo, Vince knows that fans will continue to pour their money into this company and support this culture no matter what. I've spent a few thousand dollars by now with this company, whether it's merch from the online store, or the live event tickets I've purchased and the merch I bought there, and of course there's the monthly fees for the network... so I'm just as guilty.
But of all the missteps that WWE has made since Mania, the last straw is this "no commercials during matches". It's the worst decision they've made lately, and they've made a lot of bad decisions, but it's become so egregious that it's affecting the product in a very real way. We're getting shorter matches, and even worse, we're getting stupid reasons for them to have commercial breaks so that the same match can restart or they start a different match with more participants. So it's not only affecting the actual product that WWE is trying to put out, but it's making people tune out.
But it's still time to take a break, and it's sad because this is one of the few things that The Manager and I actually like to watch together (there's this and MST3K), so I'll likely find myself watching it from time to time, but it's not going to take up the same amount of time and energy that it has been. This will allow me to free up some time to write about just NXT as far as WWE product is concerned, and it will also allow me to maintain my sanity (such as it is) as far as me not getting upset every week at Raw and Smackdown Live and shouting at my TV.
And this is not a knock on those of you who will still tune in. What's been going on lately just ain't my bag. If you're still enjoying it, or somehow enjoying it more, keep enjoying it. Shout to the heavens how much you love it, and never let someone else's opinion of the thing you love taint the thing you love.
So I bid thee a fond farewell, Raw and Smackdown. Until I am laying in my bed, wishing for the good things to come back and a gentle summer breeze caresses me from the open window and I suddenly hear Becky Lynch's entrance music drifting in from a distant Money in the Bank-themed boombox that your arms are holding aloft, I hope that you take this chance to grow and change for the better.
So we're going to have to not see each other for a while. It's not me, WWE: it's you.
I'm not going to lie to you people. I am not enjoying WWE main roster shows as a whole right now, and as you can tell from my last few weeks of columns, you can see that it's only getting worse. And there's a lot of things that could be pointed to for causing this level disdain and disillusion; you could point to the horrible storylines they keep trying to manufacture our interest in, you could point to the terrible 50/50 booking in a lot of matches, you could point to the lack of really interesting matches, you could point to the hyper-saturation of Shane McMahon, but the reality of the situation is that no matter how awful the product can get at one point or another, there's something that gives you the tiniest sliver of hope and that's what fucks you in the end and I can't live like that anymore.
Two weeks back, I made two bold statements and they were as follows: if they didn't debut either Bray Wyatt or Aleister Black that week, I was basically just going to tap out for a while and take a break from the main roster and just enjoy watching NXT programming.
Instead I got The Undertaker helping Roman Reigns against Shane McMahon and Drew McIntyre for absolutely no reason whatsoever, and then got a "reason" in that he wants to collect Shane and Drew's souls. I got Sami Zayn taking more pinfalls. I was treated to this new "We're not going to interrupt the actual match for commercials" programming concept and this turned every match into something extremely brief or something that started as a one-on-one and was turned into a two-on-two or a four-on-four or a two out of three falls match. I got the setup for a mixed tag match between real-life couple Seth Rollins and Becky Lynch vs real-life non-couple Baron Corbin and Lacey Evans to likely headline Extreme Rules. I got more "we're making matches for the next PPV and announcing them weeks beforehand rather than allowing an actual story to develop". I got Kofi working his ass off and quite possible suffering a little burnout on that end as well. I got Ricochet losing clean to A.J. Styles the night after he won the US title. I got Ember Moon losing in about 90 seconds to Sonya Deville and watching a potentially queer-baiting storyline between Sonya and Mandy. I got Alexa Bliss beating Naomi in about 90 seconds. I got more Heyman teasing Brock Lesnar appearing. This is not even getting into the madness of the Stomping Grounds main event. Then we haven't even mentioned the Twitter war that went on between Seth Rollins and Will Ospreay this past week or the things that Seth had to say about
This week was the introduction of a "new" era, as Vince made Paul Heyman and Eric Bischoff the titles of "Executive Director" of Raw and Smackdown respectively. Raw started and ended bold and they started no talky promos and got to a Falls Count Anywhere match between Bobby Lashley and Braun Strowman who, after beating the shit out of one another, Strowman speared Lashley through the LED board on the stage creating a shower of electrical sparks and arcs that seemed like an accident and elicited a "Holy Shit!" from Corey Graves, and then ended the show with A.J. Styles turning heel on Ricochet at the urging of Gallows and Anderson and the reformation of The Club looking to reclaim dominance. If all these things happened in a vacuum, this would be a pretty awesome episode. But it wasn't. It's the same garbage but wrapped in a prettier bow. I know they certainly weren't going to abandon the bullshit storylines that are not working for me. What the fuck was the cucking angle they're going for with Maria and Mike Kanellis? Why are they working Becky and Seth's real-life relationship so hard, and why are they going along with it? And why are they bringing up Street Profits now? Let them have some more good times on NXT before they do this! The only other thing that worked for me was Samoa Joe getting Kofi to take the first loss he's had since before Wrestlemania. I know that whatever match they end up having for Styles and Ricochet as well as Joe and Kofi will be great on a PPV, but I'm going to wait until then to watch them. I'm sure I'll catch recaps.
Smackdown... didn't really feel different at all this week. Aside from the fact that Kevin Owens does the best mic work on a weekly basis than pretty much anyone in all the WWE, there wasn't anything to write home about that episode either. A complete absence of Finn and Shinsuke, 50/50 booking for Bayley and Nikki Cross, Aleister Black asking his still-unknown opponent to show up at Extreme Rules, Samoa Joe getting the finger from Kofi, and Daniel Bryan being an old-school heel. It was a real slog to get through and it just ended up feeling like it was treading water.
So this should be it, right? It's hardly a nail in the coffin for WWE, but it's starting to feel like they've just... given up. They're not even really trying to keep us invested. Bringing back Undertaker feels like exactly what it is: a cheap way they can try to get older fans to tune in in the hopes it'll give a much-needed ratings bump and to try to sell more tickets for Extreme Rules so they don't suffer the tremendously poor attendance of Stomping Grounds again. So I'm out. There aren't enough performers getting stories on the main roster that I'm invested in. The only things that are actually working for me are the Alexa Bliss/Nikki Cross story (even if it's antithetical to the character Nikki created), and the ongoing saga of the 24/7 Championship and how R-Truth has proven to us all that he's the true MVP of WWE's main roster programming right now. Seth, Becky, Kofi, D-Bry, Roman... none of them can hold a candle to watching Truth weaving gold out of the potential dumpster fire that is the 24/7 title. As far as the more "extreme" elements, you can feel the wheels turning that they're trying to get back the coveted 18-35 bracket by doing something "edgy", like what they did with Strowman/Lashley and Kofi Kingston flipping the bird at his opponent. You can feel that they're trying to get back to the Attitude Era, and I am not here for that. I'm not here to watch a company devolve back to "edgier" content in order to try to get more young people to watch.
And another part of the problem is that I'm sick of grading main roster shows on a curve. I know that the prevailing excuse is, "well, you try writing 52 weeks of programming for 200 different wrestlers every week". I couldn't do that because I wouldn't try to do that. And if it's so fucking hard, why do you do it? Don't you think that WWE might be better if they gave their talent some time off for a few months like they do with other shows, give them time to rest and heal up, still do some house shows, and skip over these lame-ass PPVs like Stomping Grounds or Extreme Rules or literally any Saudi show and come back fresh with planned story arcs and some tighter storytelling? Or does that make too much sense? The only PPV's that should be actual events are the four main ones, Money In The Bank, Hell In A Cell and that's pretty much it. It's not like they're making big money off the PPVs since most people who watch them have the Network anyway, and the main source of their income isn't the people who attend the PPVs anyway.
And going back to grading it on a curve, the problem is that when it's even just marginally better than it usually is, people start raving about it. I saw people on Twitter this week calling Raw a "bold and fresh beginning to a new era" and "the best Raw in months if not years", and I'm clearly not watching the same show these people were. I'm still seeing the Matrix code of desperation within these shows and they're just not landing for me. Everything is short-term. You can't tell me that the seeds of A.J.'s heel turn have been planted for weeks and months. They decided three weeks ago that A.J. was going to do this. I'm just fed up with it.
Every fan seems to go through what I call the "Lapsed Catholic" period. You worshiped at the altar of this particular church because you had faith, but there comes a time for so many of us where faith just isn't enough and you require something tangible. If only one prayer could be answered, your faith would be rewarded and restored. We go through that with virtually every type of entertainment. If you're watching a TV series, reading a series of books, watching a film franchise, reading a comic book, or listening to a particular band and the quality is just... well, it's just not doing it for you any longer. So it's time to take a break, right? Just let things run their course and return when you're interested in something enough to spend your valuable time with this product, or at least wait until someone you trust says it's time to come back, and it makes it easier when there are wrestling programs I can watch that not only have earned my trust and devotion, but have rewarded it.
NXT is pretty much the perfect wrestling show for me. I've been following it for a long time now (I don't go all the way back but I do go back to when Finn was champ and lost his championship to Samoa Joe at a fucking house show, which had to be a Triple H bucket list thing), and it just has everything I love: long-form storytelling, interesting/fun/smart characters with actual character arcs, tremendously entertaining matches, and when their major events happen, they feel really important. No TakeOver I've ever seen really feels like, "Oh, well, this was just a match they could have had on an episode of the weekly show". These are matches that generally have the right amount of build-up, and end up quite often being something really breathtaking to behold. I know that all the Meltzer 5-Star matches generally go to all the New Japan matches, but I was glad that he finally caught on when he gave NXT its first 5-Star match grade for the Johnny Gargano/Andrade "Cien" Almas match for the NXT title at TakeOver: Philadelphia in 2017. NXT UK isn't there yet. It still feels a bit like they're still testing the waters to see which stars people latch onto so a really significant story hasn't been told yet, but they're getting there. It's a work in progress and this must probably feel like what the beginnings of the current incarnation of NXT felt like when it started.
And then there's also New Japan. Thanks to whatever happened between AXS TV and New Japan as far as securing their TV rights to broadcast the events much faster rather than waiting a month or more to catch up, we're able to see things maybe a week or so after they happened. For example, this weekend, we were treated to the opening of the G1 Climax where we had some really strong matches that were all really fun and dramatic to watch. I'm not following all the stories, but I'm here for most of them. And it's the only place I can watch Will Ospreay, who is one of my favorites. Although New Japan is not without its problems. First of all, no women's division. Second of all, they might be a little too dangerous with their talent from time to time. Obviously the most recent example of this is the Kota Ibushi/Tetsuya Naito match at Dominion where Ibushi's face bounced off the apron in a truly shocking and disturbing fashion, but they've also had a performer literally die in the ring. It wasn't recent, but I do think that New Japan needs to handle this kind of thing better. I want every single performer to be able to live to a ripe old age and not die in their forties or fifties because of massive brain hemorrhaging or their bodies just fail. It's sad when a wrestler passes away in their seventies and people talk about it like that's a surprising age for a wrestler to pass away.
What am I forgetting? It seems like there's this other promotion that everyone's talking about...
All Elite Wrestling is built on a very solid foundation and really feels fresh and exciting. I didn't watch Double or Nothing because it is kind of hard to justify spending $50 on a PPV unless you're having a viewing party where everyone's kicking in a few bucks, but thankfully Fyter Fest was free to watch in North America, and as it turns out, so will their upcoming PPV, Fight for the Fallen. And that's this upcoming weekend! Fyter Fest was a bit of a mixed bag (unprotected chair shots to the head should be an absolute no-no in 2019), but mostly very entertaining. Plus they have a roster that really feels unique, so when their weekly show starts up in the fall, I'm already waiting with bated breath for a number of reasons. First, this just seems like it'll be a strong alternative to WWE main roster stuff. Second, and maybe more importantly, it might just cause WWE to have to actually improve their main roster offerings. Although as I stated earlier, it feels like instead of going forward to make their brand more accessible, they're trying to go backwards to a time where they were the only ones really being talked about as far as pro wrestling was concerned.
It would be unfair to say that WWE's only problem is Vincent Kennedy McMahon, but it would be fair to to say he's certainly their biggest problem. After all, he runs this shit. And the problem with him having absolute power is that men in their 70's tend to not be the most, well, accepting of the current zeitgeist surrounding pro wrestli... ahem, excuse me... sports entertainment, and they will always believe that they know best because they've made the most money at it, and that sentiment right there is indicative of American exceptionalism at its most grotesque. Vince believes he's the best because he's the most wealthy, but there isn't a one of us who should ever believe that money equals genius. And we've all seen the John Oliver piece by now, so yes, we know how shitty the culture at WWE can be. The modern analog to indentured servitude, the lack of health insurance, the union-busting, the racism, sexism, ableism, etc., and it would be great to have all that end. And there are advocates for that on the inside. John Cena refused to work last year's Saudi show, Crown Jewel, and Daniel Bryan refused to work both that show and the recent Super Showdown. And like CM Punk's pipe-bomb promo, Vince knows that fans will continue to pour their money into this company and support this culture no matter what. I've spent a few thousand dollars by now with this company, whether it's merch from the online store, or the live event tickets I've purchased and the merch I bought there, and of course there's the monthly fees for the network... so I'm just as guilty.
But of all the missteps that WWE has made since Mania, the last straw is this "no commercials during matches". It's the worst decision they've made lately, and they've made a lot of bad decisions, but it's become so egregious that it's affecting the product in a very real way. We're getting shorter matches, and even worse, we're getting stupid reasons for them to have commercial breaks so that the same match can restart or they start a different match with more participants. So it's not only affecting the actual product that WWE is trying to put out, but it's making people tune out.
But it's still time to take a break, and it's sad because this is one of the few things that The Manager and I actually like to watch together (there's this and MST3K), so I'll likely find myself watching it from time to time, but it's not going to take up the same amount of time and energy that it has been. This will allow me to free up some time to write about just NXT as far as WWE product is concerned, and it will also allow me to maintain my sanity (such as it is) as far as me not getting upset every week at Raw and Smackdown Live and shouting at my TV.
And this is not a knock on those of you who will still tune in. What's been going on lately just ain't my bag. If you're still enjoying it, or somehow enjoying it more, keep enjoying it. Shout to the heavens how much you love it, and never let someone else's opinion of the thing you love taint the thing you love.
So I bid thee a fond farewell, Raw and Smackdown. Until I am laying in my bed, wishing for the good things to come back and a gentle summer breeze caresses me from the open window and I suddenly hear Becky Lynch's entrance music drifting in from a distant Money in the Bank-themed boombox that your arms are holding aloft, I hope that you take this chance to grow and change for the better.
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