8 Ups & 13 Downs For WWE In 2021
Fans returned, Big E rose up, Roman reigned and Becky went Big Time. Also, pizza, zombies and eggs.
This list cannot be what it once was.
WWE is the organisation that won itself an industry monopoly and spent 20 years gradually eroding its relationship with its core audience until they didn't have it anymore. Imagine Pepsi just finally giving in after years as Number Two and Coca Cola celebrating by reintroducing New Coke as the primary product before changing the shape of the cans and bottles into receptacles too sharp to drink out of and eventually switching out every flavour variant for one type diluted juice. Consumers would look elsewhere and probably eventually settle on something new that hits like the Coke or Pepsi they remembered before the whole soda game went to sh*t.
When folk aren't so tribal, it's easy to see how everything over the last few years has gone as it did. Raw and SmackDown specialise in the risible - what once might have scanned as the year's worst segment is now a weekly standard practice, so to isolate them here would result in a Downs section so vast it'd probably set the WhatCulture server room ablaze.
You know, a bit like what happened to The Fiend before he lost to an RKO in five minutes and then got released...