5 Ups & 6 Downs From WWE Raw (25 May - Results & Review)
2. More Impromptu Matches Fill Out Raw
Being General Manager of a WWE program must be one of the easiest gigs out there when it comes to booking matches. You just show up with one or two matches and a half-hour gap on your show, then let your wrestlers argue backstage and make mid-show matches to fill those spots.
Monday night, Raw GM Adam Pearce presumably had a half-hour window in the final hour of Raw to fill, and he was fortunate that Seth Rollins and Montez Ford started puffing their chests, and that Ethan Page egged Rusev into confronting Rey Mysterio to be next in line for the Intercontinental Championship. Otherwise, WWE would have had to run a test pattern for a good swath of the program.
Just to make this point again, impromptu matches on their own aren’t a bad thing - egos collide and tensions boil over, necessitating the occasional matchmaking on the fly - but WWE books (in storyline) half of their matches in this manner, which means that (in storyline) the biggest wrestling company in the world shows up to live television each week with an incomplete card and just crosses their fingers that stuff happens to fill the time.
It’s lazy booking, period. Rather than using the backstage conflict to book next week’s show and actually tell multi-week stories, they opt for using impromptu matches as a crutch for self-contained booking angles inside one episode. Lather, rinse, repeat.