5 Ups And 7 Downs From WWE TLC 2020

1. Playing With Fire

Randy Orton The Fiend
WWE

Ratings are down? Don’t worry, PAL. Vince McMahon has the cure: Light a wrestler on fire.

No, we’re not just talking about the typical inferno match with a person’s body part being briefly lit on fire and then extinguished. We’re talking about Randy Orton committing attempted murder by dousing The Fiend in gasoline and then lighting him aflame. Well, an obvious dummy dressed like Fiend, but you get the point.

This was beyond stupid, and desperate as hell. Ratings are in the toilet, so the solution is to book an inferno match at the last minute and then immolate a person on television, because that will bring wrestling fans back to the nest.

It can’t be expressed strongly enough how insanely stupid this is, and how this stunt exemplifies how out of touch WWE is as a company if this is their response to falling ratings and getting beat by AEW. Somehow, lighting a person on fire is supposed to be what wrestling fans want to see in 2020, according to Vince.

This is just a really sad statement on the current condition of WWE.

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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.