If WWE Was Being Honest About 2020
Ratings have stabilised to a just barely respectable number after tumbling to record lows. SmackDown has quietly undergone a renaissance of sorts, but beyond the appreciative and almost condescending nods, it hardly feels like a hot product that the entire pro wrestling world is talking about. The thing about WWE, and this is the crucial bit, is that even a good WWE show is rotten television on a fundamental level.
WWE television relies on invisible cameras and very convenient blocking and character decisions to set the sh*tty events in sh*tty motion. Even when the wrestling is good, WWE can only be bad - or at least objectively unconvincing - television. Very rarely is a main event set. It is almost invariably set up on the show itself, via interruption or promo train. What would happen, if that opening promo went uninterrupted? But it never goes uninterrupted. Because it is scripted, and thus fake. It is impossible to suspend one's disbelief when watching, and that is the essence of professional wrestling. Even if the promo is good and the match even better, the way in which WWE tells the story is inherently contrived. It doesn't work when it's not Vince McMahon and Steve Austin popping everybody's t*ts off in a heightened new reality. No concession to logic is made at any stage in the process.
WWE continues, after two full decades in which it has slowly relinquished a monopoly it by rights should never have, to use Vince Russo's TV format. For years, people accepted this.
Past tense.
CONT'D...(3 of 6)