10 Times WWE C-Shows Were AMAZING

Does anybody still watch Main Event?

Are you surprised to learn that this 'C' show remains on the air, on television no less? Is it even worth the derisory designation of 'C' show in this super-served era of content? The flagship shows always took precedent over the likes of Velocity, Metal, Jakked, Heat, whatever, and now, so too do NXT and 205 Live.

Moreover, WWE's drive to produce localised content (of which NXT UK is the pilot) relegates Main Event, nestled alongside good commentary and Finn Bálor's career trajectory, yet further on WWE's list of priorities. Even the hardcore fan WWE strives to bludgeon surely cannot recall the last month or so of the Main Event landscape, for the show principally exists to milk a market in the most unimaginable and uninspiring manner possible.

If a performer isn't deemed important enough to appear on a three-hour episode of Monday Night RAW, they are shunted to this ironically-titled wasteland. And, while there is no real impetus to watch, fair bloody play to those performers: they certainly have an impetus to perform.

Even the tyrannical Vince McMahon could care less about these shows - and that's perhaps why, with a startling hit rate, they can be sensational...

If the ECW programme between Rob Van Dam and Jerry Lynn was a video game, Star Fox for the SNES is the best comparison: groundbreaking and jaw-dropping for its time, the frame rate crumbled whenever the ambition became too lofty. The inventive, rapid, chair-assisted offence required fluid motion, but the two men perhaps asked too much of themselves, just as Nintendo asked too much of a 16-bit system with only an illusion of 3D tech.

Transposed to and resumed in the WWF for one night only, shoved to the sidelines amid the ongoing Alliance storyline, this was a shorter, less glorified addition to the canon - but arguably better for its streamlined discipline.

RVD and Lynn rolled through the hits early on, reminding an audience that gauging by the booming E-C-Dub chants didn't need reminding of their sumptuous chemistry with and inside-out knowledge of one another. Lynn in particular wrestled with something-to-prove abandon, controlling his body in a high-pressure environment to rid himself of the botches that plagued the weaker, overlong entries of the series. Van Dam was at his best, too, in keeping with his incendiary 2001 form; the angle at which he took a German suplex was a proper lip-purser.

In the end, it was all for nothing. Lynn failed to impress WWF officials. Still, if they didn't know what they were missing, we still remember it fondly over a decade and a half later.