6 Ups & 6 Downs From Last Night's WWE SmackDown (25 Oct)
WWE SmackDown becomes the black and blue brand as Brock Lesnar unleashes The Beast.
The Ups and Downs format is one that, thankfully, provides a digestible way of reviewing content that's often really hard to swallow. For WWE specifically, overload has been one of the key factors in their generational creative decline.
There's a lot of insufferable Tony Khan bootlicks suggesting that AEW have somehow torn up everything we all thought we knew about the stoic state of professional wrestling after just four television shows and a few hit-and-miss pay-per-views, but there has been some hegemony under the hyperbole. AEW, through logical booking thus far, has taken ownership of common sense storytelling again. In doing so, WWE is placed under sharper focus for some of the more outlandish elements of their tried and tested tropes - even when events are graded on a generous curve.
This now informs the heightened (and reasoned) scrutiny of WWE's most monied television show. But what of it this week?
It was an episode that was marginally better than the Ups/Downs ratio from this article's title suggests. An episode marginally better than All Elite acolytes would be willing to admit. But an episode that's likely to see a more-than-marginal ratings slide for WWE in a relationship with Fox shaky enough to have the network's Twitter account now openly permitted to take the p*ss out of the product.
SmackDown was great, SmackDown was okay, and SmackDown was awful. Whatever old-is-new-formula there is to find from making a two-hour TV show, WWE could do with finding it quickly.