7 Ups & 9 Downs From WWE Raw (Nov 8)

8. Like A Light Switch

Since returning to live crowds, WWE probably has had a hard time adjusting to the notion that the fans don’t always react how the brass would like – if they react at all.

For more than a year, the company was able to just press a button and generate the fan reaction they wanted for heroes and villains, so seeing stuff play out to silence or to the wrong reaction had to be unnerving for WWE.

Of course, rather than taking the poor fan involvement as a problem with the product, WWE decided that the proper course correction would be to start using piped-in crowd noise during the live show. (Taped shows almost always had artificial crowd sweeteners, but the live shows presented a bit of a challenge.)

On Monday, we got one of the clearest examples of this when Adam Pearce was running down the history of the Survivor Series and started name-dropping the debuts of Undertaker, The Shield and The Rock. The “crowd” cheered louder and louder. Then Pearce turned to his next point, and the crowd cheers disappeared in less than a second, as if a switch had been flipped or a dial turned all the way down. Worse, you could see the fans behind the ring, and they weren’t reacting at all.

So unless the thousands of off-camera fans were losing their minds and then stopped cheering in a coordinated effort, this was just a really poor and obvious crowd sweetener. *Play boo.wav here*