10 Times WWE Were OBSESSED With Pointless Power
6. The McMahon-Helmsley Faction/Regime
Triple H and Stephanie McMahon's original union helped yield a string of commercially and critically revered pay-per-view programmes in early 2000. But much like everything back then, the shelf life for the act was surprisingly limited.
Russo had bludgeoned audiences across both WWE and WCW with gangs of goons in the ring talking sh*t. Beaten the trope down to a point where even the name (first the "Faction", then the "Regime") felt laboured, let alone the concept. Yeah, Triple H was often World Champion and Vince McMahon was stood right there, but so too were X-Pac and Road Dogg, deep in chat with The Stooges.
Some circumstantial evidence to support this - by 2000, the speed at which Edge & Christian, The Hardy Boyz and The Dudley Boyz had supplanted the New Age Outlaws/D-Generation X dominance of the doubles division was such that it rendered them dinosaurs just two years after they'd done the same to the Legion Of Doom. As dweeb heels and friends of Kurt Angle (who in turn was trying to impress Stephanie McMahon because WWE was simply never better than under Chris Kreski's 2000 storyboarding and Brian Gewirtz' ear for a good gag), E&C found themselves needed for grunt work on behalf of the group. "We are so working for the Fact-gime" put over their dorkiness whilst also tacitly revealing how silly the giant gang work some months removed from their peak.
The losers weren't the nerds - they were the jocks that didn't know they were losers.