A few weeks back, I wrote about how SmackDown Live, following Backlash, had overtaken RAW and become the better show. Then, last week, I wrote about how important it was to have Sasha and Charlotte main event the upcoming Hell in a Cell PPV this Sunday. Well, this week I'm sort of mashing those two topics up into an unholy abomination I'd like to call "What the hell is wrong with RAW?"
It's a little song, a little dance. Some seltzer down the the pants. Batman's head on a lance. Basically, I thought about writing up a quaint "RAW sucks" piece this week after I watched RAW and it sucked, but what really got me was the announcers, and ads, on SmackDown that kept repeating, over and over, that Hell in a Cell featured a TRIPLE main event. Because the women were now a main event. Which is great. I already covered that. But no one wants a triple main event. Unless you're Fully Loaded 2000, double's as deep and wide as it should go. Two main events, tops. Which makes us all seriously side-eye that ding dang Roman/Rusev match. Why is that a main event?
I certainly hope it's not just because it's Roman Reigns and there's still some vile experiment at work to try and convince us he's a top star. I'm hoping that the decision to put Reigns and Rusev in the cage honestly just came first. Sasha and Charlotte got a Cell match after them and, by that point, there was no going back and taking the Cell match away from the U.S. title bout. And since it's a Cell match at HIAC, it's automatically a "main event." This is my dream. It's what allows me to rest comfortably at night, free from night sweats and moon frets.
I guess my meaning here is that Sasha vs. Charlotte is the only one of the three Cell matches that feels important and main event worthy. I know, I know. Rollins and Owens are battling over the top title on the brand and that gets the top spot. But I'll ask you this: What do you care more about? The Universal title or the List of Jericho? Ah ha! Exactly!
The List is the biggest men's division prize on that show right now. Not that you can win it or pass it back and forth, but we all certainly saw it get stolen by Seth on Monday and it was basically the crux of the entire broadcast. Jericho looking for that list, demanding the list, finding the list, adding people to the list - that was the freakin 'show! Without the list, RAW would have been even more of a tumbleweed than it was.
Let's break it down. There were no women's matches on the show. There was an arm-wrestling thing with Bayley and Dana and a LOUD NOISES! shout off with Sasha, Charlotte and Mick (thanks to Wrap Up reader Truiit for pointing this out - he took his daughter to her first show and she was very disappointed). New Day is fun, but are they a FULL SEGMENT promo's worth of fun? Still? Commercial break to commercial break? I don't think they'll feel vital again until the beat Demolition's reign record and drop the belts because right now, no one expects them to lose for another 60 days or so.
Which means Cesaro and Sheamus will come close, lose, blame each other, and then just start feuding with each other again. All of this is being done to keep Cesaro in a holding pattern. They'll let him go over Sheamus, but not if it means a world title shot, so they couldn't let him win the best of seven series. Instead they had to blow it the hell up.
So why am I being so hard on RAW? I mean, there are always off weeks. Or months. It's just that right now, as it happens, RAW has this weekend's PPV. Aside from the Women's Title match, I feel nothing for it. RAW also is in the midst of hyping the monstrous Survivor Series main event -- Goldberg vs. Lesnar -- which, considering how this week's hype bit went, could wind up being a disaster of mind-warping proportions. Maybe it is good that they didn't save it for 'Mania.
The Brock segment this week was confounding. Heyman was so off his game that I seriously wondered if he was having an aneurysm. Poor Paul had to pretend like the crowd was chanting "GOOOOLDBERG" when they clearly were not (the Minneapolis crowd was cheering for Lesnar - WHO COULD HAVE EVER GUESSED?). This was a massive mishap. It's rumored that Vince flipped his wig, lost his s***, blew a gasket and all that. The bit bombed, Heyman was flustered, so it ended quickly. I'm curious to see who the Toronto crowd actually sides with. All I know is God help those two if they decided to put on another drag ass clinic like they did the first time they fought.
Also... *dead horse time*... RAW is still three hours. This will always be a problem. It will always create a huge challenge, week in and week out, to create an entertaining show. Every week, the writers swim upstream trying to book such a mammoth block of time. I won't go into it fully, you all know the drill. It hasn't gotten any easier in the years since it started being this long. It's a constant, nagging hangnail. Like I said, without The List, what would we have even watched on Monday? Jericho's doing some of his best work right now, but part of me wonders if I think it's even better than it is because he's competing with Golden Truth and Curtis Axel matches.
Continue on for SmackDown, Lucha Underground, and more...
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