10 WWE Shows That Should Have Been Season Finales
Must the show go on?
WWE earned a minor ratings spike following their main roster move to the ThunderDome from the Performance Center.
The SummerSlam go-home edition of SmackDown was selected as the show to gobble up all the curiosity views the shift generated, and with good reason. August 14th's flagship drew an average of 1,979,000 viewers across the two hours, but the same figure shot up to 2,168,000 thanks to the new technology. Buoyed by the return of Roman Reigns, some strong angle advancement between Bayley and Sasha Banks and various teases of things to come between Bray Wyatt and Alexa Bliss, the number crept up to 2,261,000 on September 11th.
With no star as big as 'The Big Dog' nor angle as hot as the splitting of the Golden Role Models, Raw's ratings have gone in the opposite direction after a similar jump brought on by the aesthetic shift. This was to be expected though. WWE never ever stops, didn't stop during darker chapters in 2020, and hasn't overhauled its churn to cope with the changes.
The background might have switched from an empty gym to a wall of Zoom calls, but the foreground is achingly familiar. If only just staying f*cking still for a second was ever thought of as an opportunity, rather than a petrifying threat...
10. SmackDown (March 13, 2020)
What a strange and innocent bit of in-work bullying and banteriffic WWE content this was.
The world was either in or just preparing for lockdown as Triple H opened the March 13th edition of SmackDown with the sort of convivial warmth that couldn't possibly have imagined how normal the strange aesthetic he was presenting would become.
'The Game' manned the broadcast alongside Cole (and was clearly buzzing from all the tweets enjoying how much he was ripping the p*ss out of the lead announcer), as a show with empty seats facing the hard camera aired for the first time since they no say in the matter back in 1995.
If only a Bret Hart or 1-2-3 Kid were kicking around here. A perfectly acceptable two hours of wrestling tried to meander on as if WrestleMania was still going to happen at a stadium and/or millions of people weren't about to be impacted by a global b*stard transforming the face of the world outside our window.
A sizeable portion of the viewership had already started working from home at this point, but not WWE's indepdent contractors!