6 Ups & 6 Downs From WWE Raw (Aug 31)

3. Team Hell No 2.0

Nia Jax Shayna Baszler
WWE

Oh dear God, they’re seriously trying to recycle Team Hell No for the women’s division, aren’t they?

The misadventures of the wacky tag partners Nia Jax & Shayna Baszler continued Monday night, as the new WWE Women’s Tag Team Champions spoke backstage and bickered about who followed whose lead, which was just cut-and-paste dialogue from 1,000 other promos.

But the antennae went up when Nia blurted out, “I’m the tag team champion,” and Shayna just holds the other title. Wait, “I’m the tag team champion?” Where have we heard that before?

Right. Kane & Daniel Bryan turned that phrase into a chant that carried them through group therapy with Dr. Shelby and to the top as one of WWE’s most popular acts. Just hearing Jax utter that phrase made this writer cringe, because it already felt like the writers were going for “wacky tag partners who hate each other,” and now they’re using a phrase uttered by probably the most popular success story from that old WWE trope.

But here’s a spoiler, not a prediction: no chance in hell that Nia & Shayna are or will ever be 1/10 as popular as Team Hell No.

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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.