It’s common for many of us to watch WWE Raw and enjoy aspects of it and even the show overall, but in many ways it’s a typical house show as it uses instant gratification rather than engaging stories.
Over the years, WWE looks like they’ve become complacent in their shows, and even with AEW making noise they haven’t done much to improve the storytelling aspect.
They lack a logic to how their storylines run. Every wrestling character has a different thought process and needs some kind of motivation to confront or attack someone.
This is a basic formula in storytelling that’s missing on Raw for the most part. Sure, there are a couple of storylines that take those into account, but they’re few and far between.
Creating moments
It can be argued that Vince McMahon prefers making moments that fit into an easy to produce minute or so, and that’s why the WWE has shifted away from storytelling.
We’re also an instant gratification society, and by throwing several big names into matches and making them triple threats, fatal four ways, and so on, it’ll give us a high flying moment we won’t forget.
The only problem is those moments are pushed so hard that one match or moment is next to impossible to tell from another as spot fests have taken over the sport.
They just put people in matches without hardly any backstory, promo, or reason for doing so.
Their desire to make the WWE more athletic based where the wrestlers are focused on winning championships is a good way to change up the pace, but they need more variety.
Their best feuds have been when it’s been personal between the wrestlers, but aside from the over extended Mysterios and Seth Rollins’ feud, they tend to last a couple of weeks and that’s it.
Trimming the fat
One thing that doesn’t help is they use the same people in the same basic format every week and every episode.
Each hour starts with a talking segment that lasts anywhere from 5 to twenty minutes and leads into a match.
To make this work, just about any wrestler that’s decent on the mic gets a “talk show” to help promote their feud, and they tend to lead to a match immediately afterwards.
Last night was a twist as we had the KO Show to open things, then the Miz came out before the Mysterios tag match to cut a promo for the segment while the Mysterios waited for their opponents to come out.
It slowed the pace while Miz railed on about how he and Logan Paul are the best in the world. It offered nothing to the show but remind us of their WrestleMania match we already knew about and the commentators continued to point it out.
These are just some of the criticisms we hear from others in the profession and noticed ourselves. Comparing the current show to the one twenty years ago shows how far the bar has dropped.
Will Raw work it’s way back to being a dominate show? Let us know in the comments below.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xRWp7VIkiQ
