Alex Rants On: RAW, January 16, 2017
This week’s RAW is automatically one of the best shows of the year (though that’s not saying much). Why? Because Stephanie McMahon wasn’t on it. That’s right. In a rare twist of fate, the evil boss didn’t verbally destroy one of her own employees to make herself look good, nor did she open the show with a long-winded promo, as she is known to do.
Instead, we got a promo (yes, I know, this is still going on) that descended quite quickly into a brawl that set up the main event for later that night.
All in all, this show wasn’t too bad, but it felt…well, it felt like a thrown-together hamburger. You could feel the beginning and the end were done right, but there was a lot of random stuff thrown together in the middle, and you weren’t sure what the meat inside was supposed to be.
So with that out of the way, let the rant begin.
RAW opened with a fine little brawl, and Brock Lesnar standing tall at the end. It was all fun and exciting, although there was one glaring flaw: Roman Reigns didn’t care an iota about losing the US Championship.
He shifted focus almost directly to the WWE Universal Championship as if his entire US title run didn’t even exist. And people wonder why the titles are still perceived to be so insignificant.
The crowd was somewhat hot for this segment, so there was hope that they’d stay that way for the rest of the show. Unfortunately, those hopes disappeared before the first hour of the show was even done.
Ariya Daivari came out to pretty much no reaction and he’s supposed to be the big heel in the match. Here’s the problem. WWE have this massive production team that’s capable of changing the sound of every match and entrance.
This is the same production team that’s become notorious for quieting the boos geared towards Roman Reigns and other sounds they don’t want the audience watching at home to hear.
So if they have that kind of power, why don’t they do the opposite and increase fan volume for wrestlers that aren’t getting enough sound?
I mean, watching this cruiserweight match, it felt like the audience was at a funeral. They were so quiet that one could almost hear the sweat dropping off of the wrestler’s heads. Why wouldn’t WWE promote its own wrestlers by using fake noise to try and convince the audience watching at home that the live audience is having more fun than they really are?
If a smart person were running the production department, they’d try and increase the volume of fan reaction as much as possible. Doing so would give off the impression that the live audience is more interested in the match they’re watching.
This would, in turn, encourage more fans to attend live.
Instead, throughout this entire match, there was no reaction whatsoever. Not even sustained boos for the heel or the mildest of cheers for the babyface. WWE, you have an enormous production machine that you can use to help your stars elicit a reaction. Use that, for crying out loud. It’s not rocket science.
This was even more evident during the later match between Brian Kendrick and Cedric Alexander. No matter how much they overbooked the match (with Alicia Fox interfering and all that), the crowd did…not…respond. They were dead silent up until Cedric’s finisher.
No wonder Vince is supposedly disappointed in the entire division. If crowd reactions are like this for the majority of the division, it wouldn’t be surprising if Vince starts contemplating pulling the plug on the division by year’s end.
Of course, this isn’t the fault of the wrestlers themselves, but the bookers. They tell the wrestlers to tone down the style that made their tournament famous and is then booked in the exact same way as everyone else on the roster. It seems like WWE’s writers have to paint everyone on the roster with the same brush, without exceptions.
Given that approach, they could bring in Jushin Thunder Liger, the man that’s essentially the God of Cruiserweights to WWE and they’d still find a way to screw up the Cruiserweights’ booking. Unless WWE loosens the reigns on the Cruiserweights and gives them more freedom to perform like they did in the Cruiserweight Classic, the fan reaction will still be apathy bordering on boredom.
Shortly afterwards, WWE showed a video of Nia Jax attacking Sasha Banks as she was having her knee evaluated. The main point with this is that, try as they might, WWE simply could not make this look realistic.
No one stopped her from getting into the ring, despite a dozen or so people about the ring. Instead, all of them stood around and ‘pretended’ not to notice Jax coming down to the ring until after she had already begun her attack.
It would’ve been better if a bunch of them rushed Jax to prevent her from getting into the ring, only for her to deflect all of them away and go on a rampage in the ring.
If WWE wants to book Jax as a monster in the women’s division, they’ve got to start treating her like one. The commentators could’ve done much more to make Jax look like a true threat, but, for some reason, couldn’t get the message across properly.
Maybe it’s because, for Michael Cole, the only difference between his regular voice and his ‘serious voice’ is a slightly lower tone. If he actually showed emotion in his commentating and differentiated how he felt, maybe the audience would subconsciously invest more into the stories presented to them.
Moving on, WWE kept reminding everyone that it was Martin Luther King Day in the United States, a day on which the country remembers one of their most prolific civil rights leaders, one that played a critical role in ending segregation in the country and bringing more rights to the general population.
Unfortunately, WWE was poised to celebrate Martin Luther King Day by booking the continued death of Titus O’Neil. He’s been corny and uninteresting before, but things reached new lows for him this week.
From ripping off the New Day in every conceivable way to spanking Big E on the buttocks (I have no idea what’s that supposed to accomplish or which segment of WWE’s audience that would appeal to), the match between O’Neil and Big E was, to put it lightly, a dumpster fire.
The New Day should be in a more intriguing feud right now but are instead brought down to a much lower level due to WWE’s inability to book more than one major rivalry in a division.
Later on, Charlotte began to cut a fantastic heel promo that really made people hate her. But instead of booing or getting invested in the promo, they started doing the ‘WHAT’ chants. The segment was on its way to being the best promo on the show until Bayley started doing poetry.
Poetry…on a wrestling show. This wasn’t something that fans watching would be proud of. This was one of those segments that would make your casual fan look with disappointment and feel embarrassed to be watching. Not the kind of thing WWE should be putting on if they’re trying to increase viewership.
After this went nowhere, WWE finally made their big announcement official. They announced that Kurt Angle would be going into the WWE Hall of Fame as part of the Class of 2017. Listening to the fans’ reaction to Kurt Angle’s WWE Hall of Fame announcement, filled me with both joy and despair.
On one hand, I, like pretty much everyone else, was overjoyed to hear that Kurt Angle was being inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame after becoming one of the best wrestlers ever, period.
On the other hand, the sad thing was that Angle, a man that hasn’t wrestled in a WWE ring in over a decade, got a bigger reaction than all of the Cruiserweights, all of the women, not named Charlotte, and more than half of the wrestlers in the main event match.
That’s the big story of WWE at this point: people that became stars more than a decade ago get bigger reactions than the supposed top stars of today. I’m not sure if this is because the fans themselves have too much nostalgia, to care about today’s product as much as they did the one of their youth, or if wrestling in itself is in a decline in North America.
Either way, it’s a bad sign for WWE if the only time they get big reactions involves contrarian fans that do what they want.
The closing of the show saw pure bedlam as six wrestlers started destroying each other. In a genuinely surprising turn of events, Kevin Owens actually stood tall for once, having sent Roman Reigns through the announcer’s table with a Powerbomb. This is how Kevin should’ve looked months ago when he was just starting off as Champion.
He needed to prove his brutality and cleverness back then. Now, while it’s a good move to have done to build up the Rumble match, it does little in the grand scheme of things to keep Owens looking like a credible threat.
So what did this RAW leave us with?
One major point: the WWE Universe of today is a shell of what it was at the turn of the century, between 1999 and 2001, crowds everywhere were so loud and so emotionally invested in everything they saw that they cheered without the need of any computerised modification.
Today, the WWE live audiences in most cities sound like they’re either falling asleep or watching a game of golf. It’s so quiet in these arenas that the audiences sometimes have to keep themselves entertained by trying to hijack the show.
There couldn’t possibly be a more scathing indictment of WWE’s product than fan silence. Hell, some fans just boo Roman Reigns because it wakes them up.
This was quite obvious on today’s episode of RAW, as the audience barely reacted to anything that didn’t involve Brock Lesnar, JeriKO, or any other alumnus that peaked in WWE over a decade ago.