12 Hot Takes On The Week In Wrestling (Jan 6)

2. Vince McMahon Needs To Get Off Television Again

The 'Mr. McMahon' segments of last week's RAW were cringeworthy and embarrassing. A fantastic performer can elevate muddy or average material, add the panache or the spark that was missing from the page. No performer on earth can elevate genuinely sh*tty material. The best they can do is to look as if they're taking the p*ss in some way: because of his desperate need to be cool at all times, Triple H is fantastic at burying the godawful script he's being asked to follow while still getting the bullet points out. Vince McMahon is not a fantastic performer anymore. Last week he didn't take the Triple H escape route, and he stunk the place out. Oh, there were flashes of the Attitude Era Vince here and there, mostly in his delivery, which was still in that ferocious bark of old - and the part of the segment where he's egging Reigns on to hit him by badmouthing the Wild Samoans is wonderful, rolling back the clock two decades. But then the fake (so, so fake) police get involved... suddenly a wild Stephanie appears... and everything turns to cold, dry crap on a stick and it's not even Roman's fault for a change. He gabbled. He babbled. He wasted time, boring the crowd by interminably wrangling with the fake police (who were terrible in their roles and who didn't even have working mics). I think he even called Triple H his brother-in-law, which was weird in an ahoy dementia! kind of way. And then, to close the show, there was this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8revWyFx14Q Beyond the horrible segments themselves, the overarching Mr. McMahon/Reigns storyline makes no sense. When 'Stone Cold' worked this angle in 1998, he'd grown to become the company's top star. The implication was that, although Mr. McMahon hated him, he couldn't risk losing ratings by simply shooting the golden goose... after all, there was a war on. That's why he kept placing him in impossible situations, and why the crowd were on the edge of their seats waiting to see if the Rattlesnake would fight his way out again. Fast forward seventeen years, and no matter how they cook it, Roman Reigns is not WWE's top star: that's still John Cena... or Daniel Bryan, if they ever allow him back in the ring. There's also no Monday Night War on, and no competition for WWE anywhere in the world. That means there's no reason that Mr. McMahon can't strip the title from Reigns, suspend him, or even fire him. There are dozens of storyline possibilities there that they€™re ignoring to re-run an old angle that worked seventeen or eighteen years ago. In the end, the glorious return of Mr. McMahon has been poorer and sadder than Lonely Virgil on a park bench. Please take him away again.