5 Ups & 3 Downs From WWE Saturday Night's Main Event (14 Dec - Results & Review)

1. A HUGE Missed Opportunity

Saturday Night’s Main Event was an easy watch, an inoffensive, mostly fun two hours that worked for both longtime wrestling fans, lapsed fans and new viewers who might have stumbled upon this network program.

However, WWE screwed up in one colossal way: they closed the show with Cody Rhodes defeating Kevin Owens, then moments later, social media exploded with clips of KO destroying the American Nightmare with a package piledriver and standing on top of a stretchered Rhodes holding the Winged Eagle title aloft. Owens then got into a shoving match with Triple H in the entranceway before leaving.

How in the blue hell do you leave such an incredible angle off your program and relegate it to Twitter? Imagine the infamous moment when the Mega Powers exploded backstage on The Main Event in 1989 if they had just pushed that off to social media (if it existed) and the program ended after Hulk Hogan defeated the Twin Towers. That angle was enormous, and seeing it on live television made a tremendous impact on fans.

The same could have been said about Owens’ brutal attack, Cody’s stretcher job, and KO’s confrontation with Triple H. It felt raw and transgressive. A network audience would have been enraptured by it. Instead, only those who track it down on social media will see it until it’s brought into canon when it’s likely aired on Raw on Monday.

This is a huge head-scratcher. They could have trimmed time off a couple matches and this would have been an all-timer ending.

Advertisement
Contributor
Contributor

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.