8 Ups & 3 Downs From Last Night's WWE SmackDown (Dec 18)

1. The Miz Is A Dork Now

The Miz, throughout 2016 and 2017, emerged as a key player, post-brand split.

Surviving the post-NXT landscape with the resilience and vile nature of a cockroach, the A-Lister soared in excellent, deeply personal high-stakes rivalries with Dolph Ziggler, and did WWE-style comedy far better than most with his wonderfully robotic impersonation of John Cena.

Now, the worst of WWE comedy has rendered him a punchline. The “gag” here is that Miz is unwittingly using the language of romance in his pitiful attempts to partner up with Shane McMahon. Here, in a segment with Vince, he told Vince that he and Shane are going through a “rough patch”. “Trust issues”. He also asked Vince, the father of the bride lol, to give him his “blessing” for their tag team. Vince refused.

This is probably for the best: knowing Shane’s in-ring activity, if they were to become romantically involved, Miz would be on the receiving end of a brutal rabbit punch.

Vince ended the segment by closing his office door in Miz’s face—closing the door also on his days as a serious proposition.

He was nonetheless afforded an opportunity to date Shane by partnering with Mandy Rose in a mixed tag team match opposite R-Truth and Carmella. This…wasn’t good: Rose and Carmella’s feeble exchanges looked deeply amateurish, significantly less coordinated than the seven second dance break, and your #30 entrants to the Royal Rumble matches and Mixed Match Challenges were defeated in about the same time as Corey Graves would last in Mandy Rose, the witless, unsettling pervert.