How WWE Became So Terrible It Altered The Way We Watch It
Kevin Owens is just another body.
Knowing that Owens is a psychopath one week and a coward the next, a winner one month and a loser the next, we don’t invest in his character arc because it barely exists. Instead, we wonder where the guy who cleanly defeated John Cena on his debut match went. Will he ever again receive the big push? Why is a gargantuan writing staff unable to piece together anything in the way of an absorbing, cohesive long-term storyline for him or any of his full-time peers?
Finn Bálor is just another body.
WWE won’t get behind Finn Bálor. We don’t get behind him either, accordingly. Instead, we fantasy book an alternate timeline in which he challenges Brock Lesnar for the Universal Championship, filling in plot holes on behalf of the writers who could not care less.
The Usos, breakout stars of 2017, are bodies in 2018.
On SmackDown, the tag teams feud over titles or, more prominently, pancakes. On RAW, The Revival are the most ironically-named wrestling act since David Flair. We can’t invest in Scott Dawson and Dash Wilder, nor virtually all of their peers in the tag team division, because Vince McMahon is fundamentally disinterested in it as a serious concern, the outlying 2017 excepted.
The Network paradigm is the death of urgency drip-feeding a slothful beast. We no longer budget for expensive pay-per-view specials; you’d be hard pressed to remember the day on which WWE removes the direct debit from your bank account. This easy payday, and the lucrative international TV revenue stream, manifests onscreen as rote, habitually retconned formula, as performers equipped with so much potential - potential shown on the independent circuit and on NXT - are squandered at the altar of lame, inconsequential, meaningless nothingness. Pushes that go nowhere; performers reading from the same tired scripts; match results that do not in any way shape the resultant landscape.
All of it, and its attendant inscrutability, fosters a culture in which what transpires behind the curtain is far more interesting than what happens in front of it. Is there any hardcore entertainment medium that even approaches WWE, in terms of just how many of its paying customers accept how dismal and unfulfilling it all too often is? Crucially, is there any hardcore entertainment medium as unchallenged in its own market?
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