When WWE premièred SmackDown! in 1999 it was exactly what Vince McMahons company needed to finally finish off its competitors. Winning the Monday Night Wars was one thing, but to dominate two nights of weekly network television would be the final nail in WCWs coffin. So, The Rocks show was born and immediately became a hit that would eventually grow its own legs and become a monster in its own right. Arguably, SmackDown!s peak came just as WCW and ECW were bought out by WWE and there was an over-abundance of contracted workers within the company. In 2002, WWE saw fit to make SmackDown! its own property by creating a Brand Extension. From this point, SmackDown! was now a show with its own roster, its own championships and its own personality. In many ways SmackDown! became the competitors that WWE sorely missed when they became the monopoly, only this time it was a competitor that McMahon could control. Since the Brand Extension was shut down in 2011, SmackDown! has shedded the personality it had acquired and, despite having consistently high ratings, has become WWEs silver medal. The new SmackDown! supershow is now the place where feuds go to die, matches from Raw get repeated and the rosters mid-card get to fight it out in pointless, throwaway 6-man-tags. On the flip-side to this, WWEs developmental program NXT has risen quickly up the ranks to be one of the most interesting and creatively satisfying wrestling programs available to the point where many in the Internet Wrestling Community argue its case for being better than Raw. NXT may not be quite there yet, but what it does have is everything that SmackDown! gave us back in 99. Here are the 7 ways that NXT is the new SmackDown! ...
Screenwriter, musician and all-round troublemaker who, when not lifting weights or securing buildings poorly, is here writing about wrasslin' and other crazy things.
