It's Official: WWE Has Debuted A New Era

WWE's worst output was an engagement generator as much as a collective in-joke.

WWE generated buzz - terrible, humiliating buzz - but it was still in the conversation. Roman Reigns suspected that Erick Rowan had attempted to kill him on SmackDown, but was temporarily appeased when Daniel Bryan hired and pinned the blame on a doppelgänger. Despite this being literally the most convenient explanation ever, the episode ended on a cliffhanger, as if to suggest Roman couldn't be absolutely sure. He was the top babyface at the time. For a while, every other match was worked under two out of three falls rules, because it was thought that WWE action was so hot that fans turned off in despair at missing some of it. The cross-brand Wild Card rule was introduced and immediately broken, and of course, WWE lied to your face later in the year with its Survivor Series marketing.

The Fiend was at large, and while every supernatural character is considered a "wasted opportunity" by fans who love that sort of sh*t, his matches were routinely greeted with mystified silence. Can you hurt the killer clown, or...?

Erick Rowan terrorised Mojo Rawley with a wacky-faced animatronic spider. Kairi Sane was turned heel before she even had a proper babyface run, which isn't as sensational as some of the other b*llocks on WWE TV - like Shorty G - but it was probably more of an indictment. 2019 was somehow as bad and deranged as 2020, the insane pandemic year in which Rey Mysterio was killed and lost an eye, in that order, and WWE inadvertently penned a storyline in which a malevolent supernatural entity groomed a performer playing a character who exhibited childlike behaviour.

2022 is something entirely different, and thus requires a new designation.

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