5 Booking Decisions that can Rejuvenate Monday Night RAW
Ever since WrestleMania, Monday Night RAW has been underwhelming. RAW lost its excitement and unpredictability factor long ago, but it still has a certain edge to it. There was still an X-Factor to the show which made fans sit for 3 hours and watch it. But ever since Wrestlemania 34 happened, RAW has gone into a slump.
The degradation in quality is significant as the 9th July episode of RAW drew the lowest viewership in the show's history. The 9th July episode drew an average 2.47 million viewers, the first time the viewership has fallen below 2.5 million for RAW.
Although financially WWE is doing better than ever, its rapidly declining viewership indicates a sharp decline in its product's quality, and rightfully so. The quality of Monday Night RAW has been terrible as of late with wrestlers having no direction in their storylines, repeating stale angles over and over which makes the program plain boring.
This can spell disaster for WWE in the future and could result in the WWE Network losing a substantial amount of subscribers which might not sit well with their sponsors.
To prevent such a disaster, here are 5 ways WWE can rejuvenate its product and make RAW must-see TV again:
Important Note: I haven't included the Universal Champion returning to regular TV on the list as that situation gets talked about more than enough already.
#5 Creating A New Top Heel
At this point in time, Raw's main event scene has only baby-faces. Roman Reigns, Bobby Lashley and Braun Strowman all play baby-face characters. Brock Lesnar is the heel champion who never shows up, and the closest to a top heel is Kevin Owens. However, Kevin Owens gets treated as a joke. Being jobbed out to Strowman again and again, he is the least credible he has ever been in his career. Usually, a top outspoken heel who used to come out on top by any means necessary, Owen's poor booking has led to a loss of relevance.
Another heel act that is lost in the mid-card is Baron Corbin but he never got over with the crowd anyway. The major problem here however is not the lack of heels but the lack of crowd connection the faces have. Roman Reigns is a lost cause, let's ignore him. Bobby Lashley had a very disappointing starting program with Sami Zayn which diminished his credibility and Braun became too over with the crowd to stay a heel and was promptly turned face.
The closest to a successful heel act we have now is Dolph Ziggler and Drew McIntyre but we can all agree their story has been quite underwhelming. Turning someone like Bobby Lashley or Roman Reigns heel seems like the best way to get the crowd invested in a main event caliber storyline. Another option would be turning a mid-carder like Finn Balor heel and pushing him to the main event scene, possibly making him the World Champion.