3 Ups & 4 Downs From WWE Unreal Season 3 (Review)
3. Rhodes Vs. Orton Shows Unreal's Flaws
From what news cycles have told us, TKO's meddling in night one of WrestleMania 42's main event is why the story around Cody Rhodes vs. Randy Orton for the WWE Championship went down like a fart at a wedding. By making Pat McAfee the focal point of their feud, adding in Jelly Roll for some celebrity spectacle, and ignoring a 15-year history between Rhodes and Orton, fans were bewildered by how a feud that felt like it couldn't fail went so spectacularly wrong.
Unreal does a better job of selling the history of Randy and Cody in the first five mins of episode five than the six weeks that led to their match in Las Vegas. As Cody walks around the WWE Warehouse, looking at famous artifacts of years gone by, he is shown his trunks from his first 'Mania, a triple threat with The Viper and Ted DiBiase Jnr. He speaks expertly of their long-running history together, as clips amplify the story he's telling.
Cody Rhodes is one of the best talkers in wrestling, and he understands every facet of the business, so when he tells us WrestleMania 42 is his favourite WrestleMania match since he came back, he will surely know that not a soul will believe him. Fans everywhere know that TKO drove Rhodes and Orton’s main event into a wall, but there’s no way WWE's "QB1" is going to blast its parent company on the world's biggest streaming platform. One of WWE's biggest stars lying through his teeth does not make for great reality television.
It's telling that Pat McAfee and Jelly Roll aren't interviewed for Unreal, and neither is Randy Orton. McAfee's role in the feud is almost entirely ignored, in exchange for showing close-ups of fans smiling and high-fiving as the match unfolded. It is a stark contrast to how people feel about the feud and match, and is one of the reasons Unreal is quickly becoming a point of ridicule for wrestling fans everywhere. It is, at best, a dishonest appraisal of how fans felt about a match they'd waited years for, and, at worst, a rank piece of propaganda.