18 Ups & 15 Downs For WWE In 2023

12. Tropes Continue

For all the praise Triple H has received for his booking this year, it can’t be ignored that the man who sat under Vince McMahon’s learning tree for so many years continues to rely on many of the same bad booking tropes his father-in-law deployed regularly.

Triple H gets credit – maybe too much – for simply booking logical angles with linear storytelling, but he has not been able to shake off the bad habits that define WWE programming: show-opening promo trains that lead to the main event being booked, impromptu matches made during the course of the show, embarrassingly bad dialogue no human would ever utter, DQ and count-out finishes after 15-minute snore-fests, and several others.

There were episodes of Raw this year where literally half the show’s matches were booked during the broadcast. What would have filled the three hours if not for the in-show confrontations?

Bad booking crutches like these show that despite how competent Triple H has been overall, WWE booking is almost a “too big to fail” mechanism, so entrenched in its ways that no one booker can fully unwind the tropes.