We all have the experience of watching wrestling with non-followers who may occasionally look up from their phones to provide humorous, ironic or sometimes even strangely insightful commentary. This is a dumping ground for such stories. I’ll start…
During Cien Almas’ entrance to the 2018 Royal Rumble
"Ughhh… we just watched this guy FOREVER last night." (I’ve failed as an educator that this was this non-fan’s only takeaway from that outstanding match)
Bayley taps out to Asuka on Raw, Feb. 5, 2018
"Why doesn’t Bayley ever win? I like her."
My wife will start doing fake lip readings when we’re watching. Usually when two wrestlers are jawing at each other without a mic. She has me convinced their mostly just talking about Mexican food.
I once had someone ask why WWE thought it was ok to have a female wrestler pretend to be developmentally disabled. They were referring to Bayley and they were serious.
I can see that. Her early NXT stuff and then again when she was first brought onto RAW and pretty much everything since has made her look like a child. She’s not Eugene levels of awful but she’s looked stupid and incompetent at every turn and it’s such a shame when you look at her series of matches with Sasha and the following world title reign in NXT, the character she had there was excellent and Vince and his booking team have totally ruined her.
I still think WWE’s total destruction of the Bayley is the most idiotic thing they’ve ever done. It was a license to print free money and they fucked it up by being WWE.
I don’t watch NXT, simply don’t have the time.
Over 60% of RAW viewers don’t watch NXT (Raw ratings #'s vs network sub count).
WWE does a terrible job of introducing NXT talent to the main roster. They do absolutely nothing to tell their backstory and give no reason for someone who doesn’t watch NXT to care about a character.
A few things they’ve never explained:
What’s Bayley’s deal? What’s up with the used car lot inflatable things during her entrance? Why does she hug?
Why does he become the demon sometimes? Why does he just paint himself but nothing else changes? What’s up with those awful hair extensions?
Why is he called the artist? Why does he look like he’s having a seizure? Why was there a violinist for a while? Where did he go?
Why is she the Boss?
One would think that someone who has watched most episodes of RAW since their debut would be able to answer those questions, but not me.
WWE needs to realize that viewers of their TV show shouldn’t have to do homework/ research to understand what’s going on. That’s WWE’s responsibility. They need to learn that the catchphrases the announcers use for a character every week doesn’t make that character compelling (it often has the opposite effect) but they need to tell a character’s story in a way that informs and connects the viewer.
Until that happens they will continue to hemorrhage their audience.
I’m genuinely curious as to how someone who doesn’t have the time to watch anything else, even NXT’s weekly one hour show, still consumes enough WWE to join a wrestling forum, listen to wrestling podcasts and constructs well-thought and well-written posts critiqing the product. This is not a knock on you, I’m genuinelly curious, as you clearly care about WWE enough to contribute but you don’t want to put anymore time into seeing if there is anything better out there.
I once had my now father in law sit me down, almost as if we were having an intervention, and tell me “You do know it’s fake, right?”
I hate the assumed notion that wrestling fans think it’s real. When I find out someone likes “The Walking Dead” I don’t assume they believe zombies are real!
Also: Do you ever notice that when you have someone who isn’t a fan watch the show, it’s always the worst, most embarrassing episode?
I once watched with a new girlfriend who had never seen a Raw before, and I swear to god Fandango was having a dance off with Chris Jericho. She just kept asking why they were doing it and why I liked it. All I could do was hang my head and say “I don’t know.”
The relationship was shortlived, but we never watched together again.
It initially was a time and lack of interest thing but after noting the terrible job they did introducing a few folks from NXT to the main roster, I wanted to be able to fairly evaluate WWE’s ability to tell stories. While I’d heard and read a lot of hype about various characters in NXT, those characters meant nothing to me because I’d never seen them.
So I was essentially introduced to them when they showed up on RAW or Smackdown.
I also remember when Ric Flair and Lex Luger were first introduced in WWF. I was familiar with both prior to their arrival but WWF did a great job in telling their stories and giving the viewer a reason to care about them.
In recent years they’ve consistently failed at this, as evidenced by all those questions I still have about characters that I’ve watched on the main roster for a couple of years. That’s a big problem. Big problem that they need to fix.
RIGHT!? She was literally their way in to a whole new market that they’ve never catered to before, which is lucrative as all heck and then Vince just didn’t get it and thought she was Eugene 2.0 and pissed that all away.
Someone print this off, frame it and send it to Vince! He need this hanging on the wall in his office.
Dude owns the fucking Network but doesn’t know that the majority of his main roster audience doesn’t watch the developmental league. Remember when they had FCW, or OVW, or DSW, or whatever… did they ever bring someone in and just assume you’d watched those leagues shows? No! Of course not, that would be insane. NXT is slightly different because they actively promote it and have it available on their streaming platform but they also have full, unlimited access to viewing figures and can compare them to their RAW and SmackDown audiences to see that they still need to put work in introducing new talent.
Vince either believes those polls from several years back that something like a billion people watch wrestling, or he believes that the NXT audience is his enitre audience and they just re-watch RAW and SmackDown that many times to boost his figures - which just isn’t how ratings work.
I’ve been pretty certain that he’s been losing it for a few years but last year when they announced Great Balls of Fire basically confirmed it for me; Vince clearly forgot the name for the Great American Bash and just rolled with it because he didn’t want to admit he was going senile.
Fuck! I hate that shit. I’ve been responding to that question for years with the likes of, “Oh no, really? Is Transformers not a documentary either?” or “You mean there’s not really an Iron Man” and such.
I genuinely hate the word fake too. Every bump is dangerous, some bumps have legit killed people. Keep telling me it’s fake. It’s predetermined, it’s scripted, it’s worked. It’s not fake.
