10 Things You Learn Watching WWE TV After 9 Months Away

For some fans, keeping up with WWE programming is basically impossible. There is so much good content out there, and WWE has been so bloated and woeful over the past few years, that it inevitably gets left out in the chaotic shuffle of life.

However, it always pays to tune back in at this time of year, because it’s the only time of the year that WWE consistently try to bring their best product to the screen. The Royal Rumble is almost always the best PPV of the year, and Wrestlemania is always interesting to watch, because even when it’s disappointing, that in itself makes for interesting discussion.

Coming at the product with fresh eyes after nearly a year away is always a telling experience. The product looks both incredibly different, and also very much the same. Some of the changes are enormous and satisfying, while others are tremendously depressing.

Regardless, of whether they are bad or good, these are the top ten things you’ll notice if you’ve tuned back in for this year’s Wrestlemania season, after missing most of 2016.

If you’ve been watching WWE for the past nine months, all the changes that have occurred over the last year have probably been introduced relatively gradually. But with fresh eyes, it’s difficult to overstate this single point – WWE, right now, is more surreal than it’s been in years.

The magnitude of the strangeness can be best epitomised by the episode of Smackdown that aired a couple of weeks ago. The show opened with Shane McMahon (!) doing a promo for the upcoming Royal Rumble like it was 1998 all over again. However, if that was not enough nostalgia for one evening, he opened said promo by talking about how the Undertaker, Brock Lesnar, and Goldberg were going to be the first three entrants. The first three entrants in the 2017 Rumble.

However, a few moments later AJ Styles came out, and he was the champion, no less. Seeing AJ Styles enter the Royal Rumble was one of the high points of last year’s Wrestlemania season, but given the track record of WWE, it seemed incredibly unlikely they would ever pull the trigger on putting him at the top of the card. But, there he was. The big cheese of TNA was fighting for the Fed, and they hadn’t buried him out of spite. This was then followed by an exchange with the Miz, where the Miz was miraculously not insufferable.

When you combine this with the fact that Kevin Owens is absolutely killing it at the top of the Raw card, Austin Aries(!) was announcing cruiserweight matches (!) on that same show, and Kurt Angle was being announced for the Hall of Fame after years in the TNA wilderness, it felt like WWE was the strange amalgamation of talents and organisations everyone hoped it might become.