3 Ups & 11 Downs From WWE Raw (Jan 18)

Alexa Bliss' transformation, Miz and Morrison's bad comedy, Randy Orton's mask, and more.

by Scott Carlson
Alexa Bliss Asuka
WWE.com

Can anyone out there explain how WWE is incapable of putting together a good episode of Raw these days?

Once again, Raw continued careening toward the second-biggest PPV of the year and looked like it was written on a beer-soaked cocktail napkin 90 minutes before the show went live. Three tag teams/partners had spats. Heatless feuds no one wants to see continued. Poor character work was written into existence. Bad comedy took center stage. Soliloquies better suited for bad theater were given.

And worst of all, the Royal Rumble felt like a simple inevitability rather than a huge event to get excited for.

But hey, those 8K camera entrances looked sweet. (No, seriously, they did.)

It’s utterly amazing how week in and week out, Raw continues to underperform and underwhelm, despite having the resources to entertain. And there just doesn’t seem to be any sign that we’re about to turn a corner. There’s no switch to flip, no magic feud or promo to spark a big change.

Raw is the Titanic, bearing down on an iceberg. And it’s incapable of making the big, sweeping turn that’s necessary to avoid crashing. And that’s just so, so sad.

With that said, let’s get to it…

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Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.