If WWE Was Being Honest About 2020
Why book this? It's such dismal psychology, and it's so easy to get right, or at least not get wrong. Book Owens to refuse to join the beating - to stare Roman down from ringside in an all-alpha chest-puff flex. Owens would have proven himself the better man. Where you sit on the table isn't a measure of that.
But no.
He just worked the match with an unfair advantage. This company cannot book babyfaces. It's like they've all become so detached and nasty that they accidentally book babyfaces as a**holes because they don't recognise awfulness as a bad characteristic (see also: the Mysterio family, Ember Moon gleefully double-teaming Toni Storm with Io Shirai).
Sasha and Bayley's feud dovetailed with Asuka's arc over the summer to near-disastrous effect. The putrid and nonsensical finishes in those TV matches almost undermined the meticulous work that went into the overarching story. Drew McIntyre's feud with Randy Orton dragged on under the flimsy pretext that Orton was simply Orton, and was entitled to repeated title shots of the sort that undermine the all-or-nothing big fight gravity cultivated - yes, sorry - by AEW. It dragged on yet further when Drew, in a manner not exactly befitting the grown man babyface, couldn't accept a clean loss. "He started it!" he more or less said - "it" being an infinite loop of a narrative.
The effect is thus: these really good programmes can only be considered really good with "...for WWE" as a caveat. This is a significant - definitive - problem because the standard for hermetic, trust-breeding storytelling has been set by a competitor tightening the gap on the all-important key Nielsen demos.
CONT'D...(5 of 6)