RAW Deal: Business as usual (and that’s a good thing)

OMAHA, USA – It’s a little over a week until WWE’s next big pay-per-view event Extreme Rules, and I can say that it’s business as usual for them.

If I said that a year ago, it would carry all the lukewarm (at best) or the dragging (at worst) connotation built into the phrase. I’m glad to say that it isn’t so much the case right now—the New Era of the WWE is based on a revolution of the midcard, of guys like AJ Styles, Dean Ambrose, Cesaro, Kevin Owens, and all the other souls that never got as big a spotlight back then as they did now. Now that the bigger players are either phasing themselves out or unintentionally being phased out of rotation, even the talent lower down the midcard are getting some important, character-building airtime.

And it’s business as usual, because with 3 hours of RAW every week, it’s impossible to deliver a high-octane product that promises something groundbreaking on every episode. It’s just not possible, and that’s okay. RAW, or pro wrestling in general, never needed to be extraordinarily spectacular in every outing. All it had to be was a solid product that people could satisfactorily watch on Monday nights. And if it tried to outdo itself with each episode, then it would eventually reach a point where it could no longer top itself and viewers would become bored, entitled, and demanding. This is okay.

The new era is still far from perfect—there are still miscues here and there, but that’s what you can expect from a team that’s trying to juggle decent writing for 3-hour episodes. The great is great, though. You can believe that.

The Underground situation

Lucha Underground came into its second season as the most touted newcomer into the wrestling scene, and everyone figured that all it had to do to meet its fans’ expectations the second time around was to keep doing what it was doing.

Well, for some reason, it isn’t working that well, and I can say that the reason for this is because it tried to do exactly that… in a format that’s different (and doesn’t work well for them). They overdid what they used to do, and in a season that’s much shorter than their epic, sprawling first season (which lasted around 10 months) every weakness is magnified.

The strength of Lucha Underground lies in its detailed world-building. The show’s writers had an obsessive attention to detail that hooked in disenchanted wrestling fans  fed up with the lack of nuance in mainstream pro wrestling (if you’ve ever heard anyone say the term “wrestling logic,” it’s that). Everyone had a backstory that was awesome, people had clear, relatable motivations for everything they did, and actual thought was put into storylines that fighters weaved in and out of, just to say the least.

This season, they tried to continue these things. New characters that were supposed to be promising and exciting showed up, but due to the season’s truncated length, these characters ended up not getting the time to be fully fleshed-out. Worse, a lot of the old favorites—strong figures like Pentagon, Jr., Aero Star, Drago, Fenix, Prince Puma, King Cuerno, the “Lucha Underground Six” who drew in fans in the first season—were pushed to the side in favor of these half-baked new faces. Only Mil Muertes, who is still a favorite but isn’t as dynamic as the names I mentioned, got to stay in the spotlight. (Until this week’s episode, of course.)

Lucha Underground works hard, but it’s now in the unenviable position of having to work extra harder to bring back the extra magia its debut season built up. The problem with taping a lot of episodes ahead of time is that the writers can’t pivot on the fly, having to commit to angles or characters that may not work. At least when you work with live shows regularly, you can pull an underperforming talent aside and switch him out with someone people react to better. LU has to figure out who its anchors are and naturally build around them, avoiding overpushing new faces that people might be tentative to bite into. They’ve got this right with a young central character in El Dragon Azteca, Jr., but everyone else needs to slow down. 

Do you listen to podcasts? Would you want to listen to a local podcast about pro wrestling? If the answers to those questions – especially that last one – are yes, then you should check out the cleverly-named Smark Gilas-Pilipinas Podcast, featuring Mellow 94.7 DJ and PWR General Manager Stan Sy, wrestling writer Romeo Moran, and all-around multimedia person and former voice of PWR Raf Camus! On their latest episode, they unapologetically trash everyone supporting Bongbong Marcos (while still talking about this week in wrestling)! Listen to it here! – Rappler.com