It's Official: We Are In WWE's Endgame
No, it isn’t. Gable spent 3,650 days working hard, enduring embarrassing gimmicks and half-hearted creative plans, but he finally realised his lifelong ambition of appearing in an integrated ad. It was his fault for spending that amount of time attempting to hone his craft, since this wrestling lark is a piece of piss.
On Monday, September 7, 2026, the company presented WWE Raw on Netflix. In an early segment, the Miz and Kit Wilson descended ringside to ridicule the Alabama fans. A comedian, Matt Matthews, stood up for his home state people. Matthews shut the heels up by flooring Miz with a flying headscissors takedown. The craft of pro wrestling is so easy that anybody can do it. Matt Matthews, iShowSpeed, Logan Paul, Jelly Roll. They’re all great!
Celebrities have been hired to drive interest in WWE since Vince McMahon first took the promotion over. This is nothing new and nothing sacred. But at least those celebrities were either known as and for portraying hard men (Mr. T), or played real, violent sports at the highest level (2x NFL Super Bowl Champion Lawrence Taylor). Bad Bunny preceded TKO, yes, but he was at least presented as having trained, and was a huge enough crossover star that it was actually worth it. Matthews simply rocked up and easily bettered a former WWE Champion. With respect, it’s not as if Matthews is a particularly big deal with a huge following of potential sports entertainment converts. He’s just one of several low-level celebrities who gets to act hard in front of the wrestlers because TKO is obsessed with the idea of taking a shortcut to drawing new fans.
The WWE product of 2026 is completely weightless. Now, WWE has not felt like a serious pro wrestling broadcast since 1997. Often, criticism of the TKO regime feels like a hysterical exercise in scoring points driven by people who are predisposed to not enjoying it. It’s not as if WWE was high art before the takeover. It’s not as if WWE, a promotion that banned the term ‘pro wrestling’ for the whole of the 21st century, was actively interested in being a pro wrestling company. But WWE at least functioned as a pro wrestling company under Vince, even if he refused to market it as such. He fired hordes of independent contractors - TKO did not invent that practice, either - but Vince knew who to get rid of, in the main. He kept veteran wrestlers around who didn’t move the needle because he recognised their indirect value - i.e., guiding younger talent through respectable matches designed to further their experience. (This is no defence of an evil man, to make that explicitly clear. He was a monster who would have gone along with TKO’s edicts if he wasn’t vile enough to make that impossible).
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