One WWE Match You MUST Watch From Every Year 1984-2024
8. 2016 - Team Raw Vs Team SmackDown, Survivor Series
2016 SmackDown Live kicked ass.
WWE can’t ever be everybody’s cup of tea, even in the more polished and basics-forward Triple H era, but 2010s WWE was proving to be for less and less folk outside of the maniacal audience of one that became increasingly more difficult to please with every passing year.
Yet, be it through dumb luck, shrewd tactics or a combination of the two, something inspired Vince McMahon at his vile autocratic worst to actually try and remember how to book a wrestling show for a few months. SmackDown Live was a successful attempt to reestablish the blue brand as more than a recap show and get a better rights deal when fee season came around. It worked to the tune of a billion dollars for the company, and six or so months of terrific TV for the WWE lifers left standing. And it turbo-charged the frankly unbelievably great Survivor Series “brand supremacy” match.
Going the fat end of an hour and featuring Shane McMahon suffering a concussion legit enough for him to blow a Roman Reigns finish, it sounds on paper like a Saudi Arabia supershow fever dream. It was in fact the best possibly version of a fundamentally terrible concept - men fought for red shirts and blue shirts as if their lives depended on it, and set the bar so high that the PLE failed to match it every time for the next half-decade.
Between some electrifying falls, the company managed to draw in the continuing stories of Dean Ambrose’s futile quest to regain the WWE Championship from AJ Styles, Braun Strowman’s fraying heel bond with the riotous Kevin Owens and Chris Jericho, The Wyatt Family’s intriguing new arc with Randy Orton, and charming (back then) buffoon James Ellsworth simply trying to exist amongst those had routinely battered him on a weekly basis.It’s easier to be made a liar and a sage when daring to suggest that WWE actually brought something special to the table during these years, but there may be no better timestamp than the 53 minutes spent in the guts of this bonafide epic.