How SmackDown On Fox FINALLY Became WWE's A-Show
Now if only they could wash the p*ss stains off of that billion dollar canvas...
On the most recent edition of WWE SmackDown, Jeff Hardy threw a pint of what we were asked to believe was his p*ss right in Sheamus' face. It was a bad Sports Entertainment segment that - while germane to the story they've been telling about Hardy's sobriety - did nothing more to heighten the tension for their match at Backlash than had already been achieved by a divisive angle two weeks earlier where 'The Celtic Warrior' effectively tried to frame 'The Charismatic Enigma' for an act of drunken manslaughter.
What follows on the next few pages is a positive piece about SmackDown, but it's important to get this segment out of the way first and not bury the lede. To steal a line from Pete Dunne's Twitter, the WWE way is still Not The Way.
No one writer or executive producer or son-in-law can fix a system broken by micromanagement and a system defined by exhaustively boring bureaucracy and self-imposed creative control. In the last year alone, Triple H was demoted (but, to ask him, given more work), Paul Heyman was elevated higher than ever before then shunted off completely and even Eric Bischoff got a few hot dinners. Former and current McMahon right hand man Bruce Prichard is latest to re-take a seat he's had and lost several times before.
But the common denominator remains, as does the broken machine he swears by that spits out turgid opening segments like Friday's, itself plagiarised almost to the word from one he featured in back in 2006.
Lazy, derivative nonsense, all of that. And the p*ss stinks more than usual on a show that has really gotten it's sh*t together in the last several months...
CONT'D...