10 Times Wrestling Promotions Came Back From The Dead
8. WWE SmackDown - 2017
It's dead.
An altogether more figurative death - WWE cannot die, and to prove it has became an odious puss-oozing zombie - SmackDown was deeply inessential in the years between brand extensions.
It was essentially Monday Night RAW 2: Electric Bluegaloo. A haven for rematches and matches that barely figured into the wider narrative, SmackDown in the early-to-mid 2010s featured very little storyline development. Virtually every angle one can recall from that timeframe occurred on Monday Night RAW, with the exception of that time Alberto Del Rio defeated the Big Show for the World Heavyweight Title. This may as well have taken place on Superstars, or another irrelevant WWE show like NXT, for how little regard WWE had for "team blue".
It's alive!
Before Shane McMahon ruined SmackDown* by incessantly referring to it as "team blue," it somehow actually felt like a different WWE main roster product in the lowkey glory of the immediate 2016 brand extension. Mauro Ranallo - better when he was produced - was a revelation in treating the action as legitimate. The narrative palette brightened considerably - Dolph Ziggler's triumph over The Miz was, and imagine the correlation here, a nice thing that people liked - and everything moved along logically and breezily.
*It was actually Road Dogg, who has for the second time undone Ryan Ward's hard graft. Way to go, genius! Maybe stop posting horrendous memes and learn how to book.