10 Worst Things To Ever Happen To Wrestling Creatively
8. 50/50 Booking
"They're all winners!" Road Dogg famously said in response to the accusation of WWE's 50/50 booking, and it comes to something that possibly the most irritating thing ever to ooze from the mouth of a WWE official didn't do so from a McMahon.
"You're all winners!" is literally what you say to your children when one of them throws a sh*t fit because you paid attention the other one for a couple of minutes. WWE is the almighty brand, its performers the wide-eyed worker bees just livin' a dream.
What a bloody patronising bastard. A wrong bastard, too.
They're not all winners. They lose 50% of the time. That's the exact point. They lose arbitrarily in a way that prolongs the story and doesn't remotely inform it, either to pad out TV time or because Vince McMahon is so busy, sleep-deprived, ancient and past-it that he forgets the result of the previous week's TV show. That, and or he holds you, your intelligence and emotional investment in total contempt, which if not blindingly obvious already was most recently confirmed by Brian Gewirtz on the Ruthless Aggression doc.
And the thing about 50/50 booking is that it isn't strictly about match results. The mentality bleeds into layouts, match duration, homogenised ring entrances: everything.
A win so often means less than a loss in other eras and promotions, particularly when...