10 Reasons Why WWE Needs To Fundamentally Change Everything About The TV Product
9. The Introduction Of New Talent
The post-WrestleMania RAW crowd have become their own worst enemy.
WWE's new tactic of debuting new talent is as half-*rsed as it gets. The company knows that the international crowd of fly-ins is both intimately familiar with the NXT set and drunkenly enamoured with them. They are almost guaranteed to receive a major reaction on the night - and it allows WWE the luxury of simply blasting their theme music ("This is such and such, he was in NXT!") and putting them over in a brief squash.
The problem is all in the follow up. The next town is meant to infer from the gigantic reaction that, say, Apollo Crews is a major deal - but WWE does next to nothing to reinforce that notion. There are no supplementary vignettes to familiarise the audience with these new stars, the likes of which are so bulletproof in strategy that it's baffling that they've become passé.
Though WWE has tragically mishandled so many NXT promotions, part of the problem is that much of the wider audience has no idea who they are. The answer is somewhere in the middle, but WWE does little to reconcile the divide. That they have so much TV time in which to do that it is borderline criminal.
To date, we know more about Kizarny than we do about Apollo Crews, and yet, that same crowd will bemoan WWE for the lazy booking they are in cahoots with.