10 Things You Learn Watching WWE TV After 9 Months Away

10. This Is One Of The Most Surreal Eras Ever

If you’ve been watching WWE for the past nine months, all the changes that have occurred over the last year have probably been introduced relatively gradually. But with fresh eyes, it’s difficult to overstate this single point – WWE, right now, is more surreal than it’s been in years.

The magnitude of the strangeness can be best epitomised by the episode of Smackdown that aired a couple of weeks ago. The show opened with Shane McMahon (!) doing a promo for the upcoming Royal Rumble like it was 1998 all over again. However, if that was not enough nostalgia for one evening, he opened said promo by talking about how the Undertaker, Brock Lesnar, and Goldberg were going to be the first three entrants. The first three entrants in the 2017 Rumble.

However, a few moments later AJ Styles came out, and he was the champion, no less. Seeing AJ Styles enter the Royal Rumble was one of the high points of last year’s Wrestlemania season, but given the track record of WWE, it seemed incredibly unlikely they would ever pull the trigger on putting him at the top of the card. But, there he was. The big cheese of TNA was fighting for the Fed, and they hadn’t buried him out of spite. This was then followed by an exchange with the Miz, where the Miz was miraculously not insufferable.

When you combine this with the fact that Kevin Owens is absolutely killing it at the top of the Raw card, Austin Aries(!) was announcing cruiserweight matches (!) on that same show, and Kurt Angle was being announced for the Hall of Fame after years in the TNA wilderness, it felt like WWE was the strange amalgamation of talents and organisations everyone hoped it might become.