Go back and look at NXTs event on Thursday: six matches, six clean finishes. Then look at TLC(S): eight matches, four of which ended with some degree of shenanigans. (R)Evolution is being praised for being a serious, straightforward wrestling program with strong performances and logical booking. TLC, on the other hand, took some strong performances and flushed them with ridiculous overbooking. John Cena and Seth Rollins could have had a barn-burner of a match that actually showcased Rollins as a threat. Instead, we got Joey Mercury and Jamie Noble interfering liberally throughout, a visual victory for Cena during a ref bump, a false finish, and a double run-in. While AJ Lee and Nikki Bella werent on par with the Charlotte/Sasha Banks match from Thursday, they threw a lot into their match, only to have it end with Nikki blinding AJ with a mystery spray. Miz got his team disqualified to save the Tag Team Championships. But the worst offender of the night has to go to Dean Ambrose and Bray Wyatt, who were having a great, hard-hitting match that then suddenly ended when a flat-screen television shorted and blew up in Ambroses face, blinding him and leading directly to his loss. This is now the fourth straight WWE PPV to end with a screwy and/or overbooked finish. Is anyone on the writing team watching the Monday Night War on the WWE Network? Theres a little promotion called WCW that went out of business after years of messed up main event finishes.
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.
