WWE: 15 Underrated PPVs You Should Catch On WWE Network

10. Taboo Tuesday 2004

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kCWXohLSjo Your enjoyment of 2004 Pay Per Views will largely depend on how much of Chris Benoit€™s work you can stomach watching. WWE will air all Pay Per Views that include Benoit on the card (albeit with a disclaimer at the beginning), and 2004 was a pretty pivotal year in his career. You have the 2004 Royal Rumble where he entered in at Number 1 and lasted the whole way through. You have Wrestlemania XX where he won the World Championship in the main event at Madison Square Garden (a match I have not watched since WWE aired it the night after Benoit€™s death, right as the horrible details involving the deaths were coming to light). And you have Backlash, an event I would be pimping in this space had he not done the horrible things he did. Some people say they have no problem watching his matches, and others will tell you they haven€™t seen a single Benoit match since June 2007. As it stands for me, I can take Benoit matches in small doses, like Rumble matches he had small involvement in (2005, 2006, 2007), and other multi-man matches (the Elimination Chamber at New Year€™s Revolution 2005). But I can€™t stand matches where he€™s the focal point, especially as a babyface with the crowd rooting for him. So when it comes to 2004, what event should I choose? I can€™t choose the events that have heavy Benoit involvement (so that takes out all the Raw and dual-branded Pay Per Views up until Summerslam), and Smackdown€™s Pay Per view effort in 2004 was pitiful. But I actually found an event worth digging back up, and that€™s Taboo Tuesday. The WWE Universe picking match stipulations on the WWE App seems commonplace each week on Raw, but there was a time before smartphones and Twitter that it was unprecedented for WWE fans to actively influence the program. And more than any other time the fans were given the power, storylines were actually affected. The booking on this show was pretty genius, and they made the worst out of a terrible situation. The night before the show, Shawn Michaels had torn his meniscus in his knee. The fans voted him to face Triple H for the World Heavyweight Championship anyway, infuriating Edge, who felt it was his time to step up to the main event. Despite working the match through the legit injury, Shawn actually was about to win the match until Edge interfered and speared Shawn, shouting €œIt should have been me!€ That was the kickoff to Edge€™s epic heel turn. The fans also voted Shelton Benjamin to face Chris Jericho for the Intercontinental Championship, rather than WWE€™s chosen boy, Batista. Jericho states to this day that he had no idea he was going to face Benjamin until his music hit. They ended up having a great match to kick off the show, and Benjamin ended up beating Jericho and starting an IC title run that would last until the following June. Despite not getting voted to face Jericho, Batista got a nice consolation prize, which was a Royal Rumble win and World Title win in the main event of Wrestlemania. Finally, something that barely gets mentioned is the interesting choice of having Randy Orton vs. Ric Flair main event the show (probably because of Shawn€™s injury). Orton got a clean win, and a bloody Flair shook his hand after the match. Orton€™s babyface turn in late 2004 by all means a failure, but this was the apex of his face run.