4 Ups & 7 Downs From WWE Raw (March 21)
Drab show on autopilot circling WrestleMania 38 because they arrived early.
If there was truth in advertising, the announcers would have opened up Monday night’s program with, “Welcome to an entirely anticlimactic episode of WWE Monday Night Raw! We’ll have lots of stuff happening, but not a lot of real, honest, good storytelling.”
Once we got past a hot opening carried entirely by the strength of Kevin Owens, the show slid into a ditch of uninspired angles and matches. This is an unfortunate side effect of WWE spending all year having only 4-5 weeks to build up PLEs, and then suddenly having two months for WrestleMania. They run out of ideas and have to find ways to try to artificially stop the angles from cresting too soon, or they try to stretch things out by repeating certain aspects.
The two tag title matches were heavily featured on Raw, and they will be again next week, with dance partners shifted. They’re desperately trying to make you buy into the idea that Seth Rollins is going to be left out in the cold during Mania, so they repeated last week’s angle of him futilely trying to swipe someone’s WM 38 spot from under them.
The result is a drab show that doesn’t build excitement. It just fills its contractually obligated three hours. Even coming up with items for this column becomes a chore, because it’s difficult to get invested in the matches/angles on Raw when they don’t matter in the grand scheme of things.
Let’s get to it…