Like I say basically every time, been a while since I’ve done one of these wrestling things. The usual reasons apply, but today I feel like it for reasons I don’t fully understand, so let’s go.
1. Charlotte vs. Sasha Banks was the best match at the WWE Hell in a Cell PPV.
I don’t know that it was the best match especially once it started to fall apart near the end, but it was certainly the one I enjoyed the most. Owens and Rollins was probably better, but I went into that one waiting for the part where Jericho or some McMahon or other interfered and that totally ruined it for me.
2. Chris Jericho is currently doing the best character work of his career.
He’s pretty great right now, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. From the WCW days onward, he’s almost always been great. And don’t forget that as much as we’re all enjoying him right now, he’s trying to be a heel. You wouldn’t know it based on the crowd reactions he’s been getting, but those people seem almost as bent on turning him face as they are on turning Roman Reigns heel. If this was truly his absolute best character work, that wouldn’t be happening, or at least it shouldn’t. It’s getting hard to tell what an audience is going to do nowadays.
3. The WWE Cruiserweight Division is a mess.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULF5oQaG2-o
As long as it features Rich Swann’s theme music on a regular basis, it will never be a total mess. But yeah, it’s pretty damn sad right now. The Cruiserweight Classic, which you should go back and watch on the Network if you missed out on it, laid such a solid foundation on which it should have been easy to build something special that it’s almost amazing that they’ve been able to fuck it up so much so quickly. It takes talent to be that incompetent, it really does.
The whole presentation since the division launched on Raw has just been wrong. The way the announcers talk about them reminds me of the midgets back in the old days, accept that the audience liked the midgets. And that brings me to the bigger problem. Why should the audience like the Cruiserweights? I’m talking about the WWE audience, not the wider wrestling audience who has seen them before and knows how talented they are. They’re thrown out there like filler, around to eat a few more minutes because Raw is too damn long. Not a single one of them aside from Brian Kendrick has any sort of character, and even that they’re doing their best to screw up. How am I supposed to believe that this is the old veteran’s last chance at success when not only did he not win the Cruiserweight Classic yet still get signed to a full-time contract, but then went out and beat the champion on television? The guy was on like his fourth last chance by the time he won the belt at the PPV on Sunday. How could anyone possibly care? And if we can’t care about that, how in god’s name do they expect us to invest in a bunch of nameless dudes trading wins and losses back and forth in meaningless matches? Yes, I know that everyone in WWE trades wins and losses back and forth in meaningless matches, but that’s my point. Nobody cares about half those guys either. That the cruisers are small and do flippy stuff isn’t going to be enough to prevent them from falling into that same trap. If 205 Live is going to be the first step towards getting these poor guys away from Raw’s booking team, the end of November can’t get here fast enough.
4. Due to all of the injury issues the 2016 Dusty Rhodes Classic has turned into a mess.
A few things have gotten screwed up thanks to injuries, but sometimes these things happen. But since we’re dealing with a concept overseen by NXT, A.K.A. the part of WWE that wasn’t dropped on its head as a child, I have faith that everything will turn out ok in the end.
5. Charlotte defeating Sasha Banks to regain the WWE Raw Women’s Title at the WWE Hell in a Cell PPV was the right call.
Before I go any further, let me state for the record just in case I haven’t done so previously that I fucking hate it when WWE goes out of its way to hype up that we’re in someone’s hometown only for that person to lose, get humiliated or both.
With that out of the way, I’m going to go against everything I just said and tell you that I didn’t mind it this time. Lately, the commentators have been playing up the fact that Charlotte doesn’t lose pay-per-view matches. That, assuming they don’t mess it up, could be a good story. It won’t ever reach the level of something like Undertaker’s Wrestlemania streak, but that doesn’t matter. Streaks are easy to understand. You hear that somebody’s on a streak and you know immediately why it’s important. And if you’re going to build a streak, sometimes you’re going to have to disappoint some people along the way, I.E. everyone who came to see Sasha Banks win a big one in her home city. If they carry this through all the way to Wrestlemania and then use it to give somebody like Sasha or Bayley a moment, it’ll be worth it.
6. Considering all of the legal issues and financial issues with TNA, what is your confidence level that they will make it through 2017?
Forget 2017, TNA is going to be around forever. TNA should have gone out of business a few months in when it came out that they didn’t have the kind of money they thought they had because Jay Hassman and honesty had never met, but it didn’t. TNA should have gone out of business every time they hired Vince Russo to do anything, especially the time that they lied about employing him and pissed Spike TV off so much that they ended up not renewing the TV deal, but it didn’t. TNA should have gone out of business when Destination America, a station that nobody had ever heard of, got rid of them less than a year after picking them up, but it didn’t. And TNA should go out of business now that it owes everyone under the sun millions and millions of dollars and at least half those people are suing them over it, but it won’t. When the end times come, the only things left in this world will be cockroaches and Dixie Carter. Mark my words.