10 Times WWE Were Shamelessly Exploitative

On the 10 September 2012 episode of Monday Night Raw, Jerry Lawler suddenly fell silent whilst calling a routine tag team match between Team Hell No and The Prime Time Players. The audience looked on in stunned silence as a commotion began to fester around the announce table. 'The King' had suffered a massive heart attack.

Just ten minutes earlier, he'd been involved in a tag match against Dolph Ziggler. He now lay clinically dead backstage, as an ashen faced Michael Cole bravely fought through his own emotions to announce that this was a real-life situation.

Miraculously, Lawler pulled through, and returned to WWE screens just two months later. He was met with a heartfelt embrace by his announce colleague in one of the company's lesser-spotted moments of legitimate emotion.

Inevitably then, the whole story was immediately exploited for cheap heat. Later that same night, CM Punk mocked Lawler's near-death experience, whilst his advocate Paul Heyman coughed and spluttered by his side. Run-of-the-mill heatmongering for sure, but given how the situation had pulled at the heartstrings of so many, it came across as particularly tasteless.

In 2017, WWE returned to the well, as Dolph Ziggler goaded Lawler during an episode of SmackDown to the effect that it was his elbow drops to the chest which had caused his cardiac arrest. Five years after the fact - and without ruining a rare feelgood moment - it was fair game.