RAW Deal: Vince McMahon’s broken machine

NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C.—Nobody knows what the WWE’s gameplan is anymore.

There is a little conspiracy theory going around wrestling social media that believes RAW is plotting its shows in reverse order. Ideally, any combat sports card would build up to a blockbuster main event as a climax at the end of the night. But since the WWE has been suffering from falling ratings—and the trend has been that RAW’s viewership declines by the hour every Monday—it seems as though they’re trying to place all the big matches at the top of the second hour lately.

This week, however, we got something strange: an unprecedented 4-team Fatal Four-Way elimination match to open the show.

If that makes no sense to you, then that’s because it really doesn’t make sense, and it seems it wasn’t designed to make sense either. For one, you’d expect that kind of match to go on last, built upon with tons of hype all throughout the show. Second of all, it looked like it was just a match that was put on just to say they were able to put on a huge match on RAW. Nobody, not even the show itself, treated it as the milestone it should be all night, pretty much ignoring what had happened at the top of the episode.

What, then was the point? Just so we could have a vehicle in which Roman Reigns can clean? You didn’t need to do that with the other two stables present—especially if they were going to advance their respective storylines later on in the night. The WWE both insults our intelligence and shows a lack of one on their part if they actually think they could win their critics over with that little maneuver.

So how do we solve RAW? It’s absolutely baffling, actually, that the company refuses to see the answer that is mind-numbingly plain and simple—organic storytelling. Why is it so hard to build on narratives little by little, slowly but surely, with substance, so that the audience would have a reason to care? How come NXT can do it? Why could AlDub manage to build monumental hype with very little, but Vince McMahon and His Merry Men just could not?

That’s why the audience looks in the offscreen narrative for reasons to care about the wrestlers they see onscreen. And if the wrestler doesn’t have anything interesting going for him—whether it’s charm or actual skill—they will reject him. That’s where the mythmaking machine should come in, but how will it serve if it’s broken, too? That’s why guys like Ryback and Roman Reigns and Alberto del Rio and Sheamus and countless others on the list aren’t getting the reactions they deserve: they’re not getting the help they need.

And if this—the machinery, not the moving parts—is the future of the WWE, then this new breed has got to think twice about where they are now. It’s only for their own good. 

High spots:

• Kevin Owens vs. Dolph Ziggler. It honestly wasn’t the barn-burner we were expecting when we saw they were going for around 20 minutes, but it was serviceable enough to sober us up in an episode that literally peaked in the first half-hour. 

• Also, Lucha Dragons vs. The New Day.

• It was interesting that some of the episode’s finer moments came in the smallest segments—the ongoing Stardust/Titus O’Neil “star room” vignettes, and this curious little storyline unfolding between Neville and Miz, who wants to manage the former in order to make him stand out a little more. These things, especially Neville/Miz, seem like they’re the only parts of the show that had some thought and effort put into them.
• I’m not sure yet whether I like the shades of gray the Charlotte character is getting into. On one hand, it would be highly preferable if they kept her in the middle a la Brock Lesnar instead of turning her full heel and flesh her out to be more three-dimensional, having other characters react to her differently depending on their alignment. I don’t know how much of an impact it will make on her marketability—it’s going to depend on how well she can play her Queen Bee role. I’m not saying the angle is great or anything yet, but it’s a step in the right direction away from the cookie-cutter character tropes mainstream wrestling loves to utilize.

Low blows:

• Let me get this straight. You’re telling me that this Jack Swagger/Alberto del Rio/Zeb Colter angle is trying to convince us to root for the babyface who wants his formerly-xenophobic old manager—who has now aligned himself with the evil foreigner who wanted to unite Mexico and the United States—to come back to him and embrace his old xenophobic ways? And this is happening while Donald Trump is getting a bad rap for suggesting America bans Muslims from coming in?
• I actually can’t decide which is worse—that, or Alberto del Rio dumping Zeb Colter just because he tripped over his scooter.
• The terrible thing about the 3 hours we had to slog through is that it dragged down all the other undercard matches that were just trying their best to put on a show. That’s what happens when the explosion happens at the beginning of the show, not at the end.

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