4 Ups & 5 Downs From WWE Raw (15 December - Results & Review)

WWE television around the holidays is almost always guaranteed to be “safe” programming. You’re not going to get a world title change or an nWo “third man” moment in December.

Monday’s episode of Raw fit snuggly into this category of a boilerplate program. The matches were mostly good, but immediately forgettable and fairly inconsequential. There were some good moments on the program, but they were in service of larger angles that won’t come to fruition until 2026.

Among the true highlights, Gunther predictably (and rightly) kicked off the show to nuclear heat with minimal effort. And then the crowd apparently wore itself out, because they spent the next two hours mostly sitting on their hands.

CM Punk delivered a Punk-esque promo, ditching his “Is it great to be alive in…” shtick and just dialing up the vitriol three weeks ahead of his World Heavyweight Championship defense. (Interestingly, Punk will have gone more than two months without defending the title since he won it last month.)

And WWE’s latest “masked man” mystery ended with the most obvious payoff that it would have actually been a legit shock if someone other than Austin Theory unmasked.

While not offensive, this ultimately felt like a mostly skippable show, right on par with a typical December Raw.

Let’s get to it…