10 Step Investigation: Just How Successful Is WWE In 2017?
9. Television Product
Monday Night RAW is a bloated and over-produced chore of a television programme to sit through, the content of it as likely to blame for plummeting ratings as overarching cable TV trends.
It exists - or should exist - to present stars in the most flattering light possible and to drive Network subscriptions. More on the latter imminently - but as a star vehicle, the flagship programme is largely atrocious.
The return of Stephanie McMahon is inevitable, and that will inevitably come with it more harebrained burials and schoolteacher scoldings. Sami Zayn in moving to SmackDown has escaped her wrath, but he has been stigmatised as a try-hard geek because he triggered the inscrutable psyche of the office. It doesn't matter that fans like him. Read that sentence back again. It is deranged.
Seth Rollins probably does have a personality, but he's not allowed to showcase it. He is instead fed generic babyface lines; on Monday's RAW, he uttered something that was as generic as it was predictable as the centrepiece of his promo: "In two weeks, I get [Samoa Joe] right where I want you in that ring, one on one, and you know what they say: Payback is a b*tch!"
It's something every babyface comes out with before the Payback pay-per-view, so obviously scripted by the same writing team that it is impossible to distinguish one talent from the next. But that's WWE TV: a homogenised and endless slog, evidently becoming too unbearable for many.