4 Ups & 10 Downs From WWE Raw (Sep 7)
Tag teams in turmoil, RETRIBUTION gets promo time and logo, tropes galore.
If you like logical storytelling, smart writing, consistency and originality, then Raw on Monday night was a total skip for you.
The show featured more than its share of typical WWE tropes – injured superstar returning via ambulance (two weeks later), tag teams breaking up, a wrestler fading to the background suddenly in favour of another, wacky tag partners, handicap matches that don’t benefit anyone involved, and an invading force that has all the corporate trappings.
Seriously, when Little Jimmy making an “appearance” is one of the very few positives we can find with Raw, you know you’re in serious trouble.
Sadly, even though Raw had a lot wrong with it, it still was surprisingly watchable. By that, we mean it wasn’t so offensively bad that you thought about turning the show off and just phoning it in. However, the episode was bad and revealed that the 37 writers the company employ really can’t figure out how to put together three hours of good television, or even just one good hour out of three.
RETRIBUTION, Raw Underground and the never-ending parade of bad WWE tropes dominated Raw Monday night, but there still is always the potential to turn things around if they would just buckle down, do the little things correctly and stop messing up stuff that’s easy to get right.
With that said, let’s get to it…