The One War WWE Will Never Win

These quirks have existed for years, of course, but this empty arena era has brought them into focus. Who takes a sofa into a gym, for f*ck's sake?

The problems, correctly, most often circle back to Vince - Vince is a lunatic, but he's not yet daft enough to actually give Paul Heyman the chequebook - but this isn't just a Vince problem. WWE is fundamentally broken, but the DNA of WWE is shared by the upper echelon of management, who, collectively, are a big incestuous mutant family that looks at outsiders with a weary glance.

Chris Kreski was fantastic at his job as head writer in 2000. Never was the WWF as critically acclaimed and commercially successful as it was back then. He was ousted, and made way for Stephanie McMahon. Paul Heyman's SmackDown of 2002, highlighted by an electric in-ring removed from the methodical in-house style, out-performed RAW. This was unacceptable. Ryan Ward's NXT made disillusioned fans believe again, but when he was promoted to SmackDown Live, the well-received changes, cosmetic and narrative, were dispensed with when Road Dogg assumed the helm, at which point the product felt homogenised and inferior. WWE is resistant to change even from within.

On the subject of Road Dogg, he again toed the company line on a recent appearance on Corey Graves' After The Bell podcast. "We script his promo and he has do it word for word now, because we don’t trust you yet," he said, explaining the company's process. The "professional" writing philosophy ushered in by Stephanie McMahon remains in vogue, even though it has never been remotely fashionable.

So a karaoke segment in which today's talent sing Road Dogg's 1995 gimmick is a counterproductive philosophical atrocity, obviously, but that's not the bloody half of it. Dogg alludes to a process of "trust".

So how long does this process take, exactly?

CONT'D...(4 of 6)