10 Ways Paul Heyman's Smackdown Was The Best Ever

10. Logical Storylines

One of the best things about the Heyman era of Smackdown is that the storylines were (mostly) logical and based on the spirit of competition or a believable motive, rather than something far-fetched or designed to create car crash TV. It was a pro-wrestling approach during a sports entertainment era. During the start of Heyman's Smackdown tenure, Raw were in the midst of a desperate attempt to improve flagging ratings. This resulted in some seriously asinine gimmicks and storylines, including HLA and the Katie Vick saga. On Smackdown, meanwhile, you had title tournaments, Chris Benoit and Kurt Angle fighting over who was the better athlete and The Undertaker wanting to kick Brock Lesnar's ass for threatening his wife and unborn child. Edge wanted to fight A-Train for taking out his tag partner, Rey Mysterio. Those are plausible things that you can believe in. Necrophilia ain't. After Heyman was removed from his post as head writer, we slowly began to see more and more juvenile comedy, unspeakably awful gimmicks and illogical storylines creep into Smackdown programming. That was not a coincidence.