Why Smackdown has been a more focused show than Raw lately
It has been 14 years since Brock Lesnar made his debut in the WWE. What one would remember is that he was the youngest WWE Champion at 25 years of age.
Now, the WWE Championship is a big deal. Not many are given the opportunity to carry it around their waist or on their shoulder.
Only a handful can boast of being the WWe Champion and most often than not they are the most relevant superstars that WWE has ever seen. Of course, there are exceptions but mostly that little nugget of a fact holds true.
Now, the point this writer is trying to make is that when Lesnar became the WWE Champion, the championship went to Smackdown, which is till date the second fiddle to Raw. Lesnar won the WWE Championship three times from 2002 till 2004 and till then the WWE Championship, the number one prize in the WWE, belonged to the show rated second in the WWE.
Then And Now
But Smackdown was leaps and bounds better than what has become of it now. It had Stephanie McMahon as the General Manager, a great rivalry between Kurt Angle and Lesnar and did what it could in the two hours allotted to it.
Till date, Smackdown is two hours long and that has contributed a lot to it being more focused than the three hour long ‘extravaganza’ called Raw.
One jarring moment on the Steve Austin Podcast was when McMahon tried (successfully) to refrain from answering the question on Raw being 3 hours long. Austin succinctly said that the opening segment might stretch a bit long and fail to set the hook.
On the other hand, Smackdown usually has a segment dedicated to the replay of what happened on Raw. Yet, it is able to construct segments in the limited slots allotted to each segment.
What Works for Smackdown
Take this week’s Smackdown for instance. Dean Ambrose and Bray Wyatt has another compelling moment in their feud. Ambrose was eventually carried out on a stretcher. They made the chair shot to Ambrose look brutal. It was merciless and it successfully moved the feud forward and added another visual element- a neck brace, an injury that Ambrose will probably sell till TLC.
Before all that Ambrose delivered a promo before his match with Rusev, which by the way never kicked off. Rusev and Lana made their way out and refused to compete. It was a good promo from both Lana and Rusev and that set the foundation for another feud between Swagger and The Bulgarian Brute.
All this happened in the matter of a crisp 14 minutes. Two storylines were well handled in a two-hour show in that much amount of time.
The show starts with a promo just like Raw and ends with a match, again like Raw mostly. And most often than not both the opening and the ending are well set.
Moving Forward
There are reports that the management is trying hard to make Smackdown as important as Raw and it should be.
Doing a three-hour show is tough but doing a two-hour show is even tougher. A three-hour show gives more space for many storylines to play out in their own sweet time. But some tend to be dragged over too long.
While in a two-hour show time is limited. One thing that Raw has in its favor is that it is live and WWE is helpless is editing so many things that it would want to edit. Editing plays a strong role in making Smackdown feel much more constructive, but it feels like it takes away from the original fervor of the moment had it played out live.
Bottomline is that, Smackdown should be watched much like the one-hour show like NXT. It has so many things that one would think should happen to Raw.