10 Things We Learned From WWE Chronicle: Dean Ambrose
Could Ambrose be finished in a year's time?
It's well established that WWE's fly-on-the-wall Network documentaries do a better job of emphasising their characters than any of the fifty hours of weekly programming they churn out on TV.
WWE Chronicle: Dean Ambrose, is the latest to succeed where so many scripted promos on Raw have failed.
The feature, documenting Ambrose's road from his recovery to recent heel turn, does a fairly stellar job of unwrapping its subjects motivations, emotions, and ambitions, presenting a three-dimensional character of the sort you'd find in actually good television shows, and not the one-note caricature we're used to on Monday nights.
What it doesn't necessarily do, is reveal Ambrose at his most candid. Though other Network docs have peeled back the curtains in superstars' lives (not in the literal manner of Total Divas), Chronicle pushes a particular scripted agenda, requiring its star to stay guardedly in role throughout. It's just about believable, but at one stage when real-life intervenes, it becomes baffling.
Still, there are a few moments when the shield drops, and we get to see just a glimmer of what the usually inscrutable Ambrose is like behind the cameras. And that he has a canny dog.
10. Dean Is A Better Actor 'Without' A Script
The documentary begins with a bleak shot of an agitated Ambrose going through the motions in a gym. He mugs for the camera, letting the crew know he isn't going to perform to their script - what they see is what they'll get. He's not "trying to be an a**hole," though he sure is managing it.
Here's the thing: this whole cold-open is so very obviously put on- but it works pretty effectively. Ambrose - and you suspect this applies to most of his colleagues - is infinitely more believable when his character is allowed to act somewhat organically, free from the shackles of WWE's dreadful writing team. It's a common theme of these introspective features.