7 Ups & 2 Downs From WWE Raw (1 April - Results & Review)

Downs…

2. The Fakest Real-Life Confrontation

One of the drawbacks of live television is that there’s no real safety net. If a match or promo goes off the rails and is a certified disaster, there’s little you can do other than get the hook as quickly as possible and call it a noble failure.

But when a segment is pre-taped, looks incredibly fake and unconvincing and WWE decides to still air it, then you have to question people’s judgment.

Who in their right mind thought video of the “confrontation” between Rhea Ripley and Becky Lynch while Mami was recording a show with Ariel Helwani was good television? Ripley was seen chatting on the MMA Hour when Ariel took a Face Time call from Lynch, who said she was outside. She then “stormed” into the studio and got in Ripley’s face, yelling about her talking about her daughter before security escorted her out… and that was it.

It was a piss-poorly acted scene that looked like a practice take actors do before they ramp it up “for real” for the cameras. There’s no way WWE producers watched this footage back and thought, “Yeah, that’s the perfect lead-in for the final confrontation between two of our biggest female superstars before the biggest show of the year.” Just scrap showing it and have Cole reference it in passing before throwing to Becky’s backstage interview, which eventually led to the much better pull-apart brawl.

Worse, this came after Helwani had conducted a much-talked-about shoot interview with CM Punk earlier, making the Ripley/Lynch fiasco look even more fake, forced and scripted.

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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.