The show began with the Tag Team Championship match, and while I would’ve preferred to see something else jerking the curtain, it’s a huge improvement from Battleground opening with the World Heavyweight title match. Of course, there’s a huge asterisk as to why this is the case: John Cena was the contender, and one of the company’s biggest stars does not go on first. (That’s the exact reason why World title matches shouldn’t go on first!) The problem was avoided, but it’s a mistake they’re likely to commit again.
CM Punk vs. Ryback topped the first hour, as it should – the feud’s cooling down and the match-up is no longer worth waiting until the middle for. Best to get it out of the way, even if it had problems (which we’ll discuss later). The Divas Championship match was used as a buffer between the main event title matches, as it should be.
But that’s pretty much it. There are still problems that need addressing, so let’s begin with…
6. Keep it down!
This actually isn’t a booking problem, but more of an in-ring problem that probably wasn’t noticed and couldn’t be fixed in the middle of the match. Dean Ambrose, in the middle of an impromptu U.S. Championship match (another issue I’ll tackle later), could be heard calling the match out loud – too loud – with Big E Langston. If you listen, and I didn’t even have the volume turned all the way up, you could hear Dean say things like “turn me around!” or “send me to the corner!” I could even hear where he plans to eat out after the show!
It’s nice to hear and pick up on the secrets of the business, but those are the very secrets the workers themselves need to protect in order to sell the illusion of wrestling! How are we supposed to suspend our own disbelief when the actors themselves are disorienting the viewer? I understand that Ambrose is very experienced and it might have just been something that got a little out of hand, but it was such an amateur mistake.
5. Champions always come out last.
Again, not strictly a problem that falls under booking, but entrance order falls under match structure (assuming we define “match structure” as the ways and means of drawing out optimal reaction from the audience and brainwashing them to follow a certain perspective towards the people involved) and match structure is still within the scope of booking.
Champions always come out last. It’s the utmost respect the show can give them; the only person who could bend this rule by a lot is John Cena, who is definitely more over than Alberto del Rio, and even then, it would have been a great boost to the latter if he came out after the perennial fan-favorite. The other offenders weren’t even any more over than the champions: the Rhodes Brothers – big faces, especially after what they’ve been through – came out before the Shield and the Usos. Dean Ambrose came out before Big E Langston. AJ Lee came out before Brie Bella. All three champions would end up retaining their titles.
I know it sounds like such a nitpicky complaint, but this is Booking 101. It seems like such a minor detail, but the error ends up being so glaring when it happens. Respect your damn champions!
4. Make payoffs worth it.
CM Punk finally managed to get his hands on current archnemesis Paul Heyman, beating him with a kendo stick atop the cell structure after beating Ryback in a tough Hell in a Cell match. Those are two separate problems in themselves (the latter I’ll discuss later), but I just didn’t think that Punk’s beatdown was the payoff we, or even Punk himself, deserved. It felt less cathartic and more “finally-we-can-get-this-out-of-the-way,” and that is not good if we’re talking about concluding a long feud here.
Maybe it was the fact that booking Heyman to stay out of the way, leaving the match to be de facto CM Punk vs. Ryback, instead of Heyman also doing his best to be a fly buzzing around Punk’s ear, making it more difficult to win the match, that made the revenge angle seem like a mere afterthought. Perhaps it was the fact that Ryback just doesn’t come at you with the same intensity Brock Lesnar does – that which makes a hard-fought battle a true war – which resulted in a ho-hum Hell in a Cell match. Or it could just be that the addition of a clunker in Ryback just cut off some of the feud’s legs from under it, diminishing the return of an ending that should’ve been satisfying.
Maybe the endgame should’ve been Punk/Brock, with everyone else – Axel, Ryback – only leading up to the huge showdown. I suppose we could take solace in the fact that it not happening now is probably Brock’s fault.
3. Give us substance.
Alberto del Rio is a Mexican who comes out waving the Mexican flag. Alberto del Rio is a vicious bully with a mean streak.
Then what?
What else am I supposed to buy about him? People need a reason to boo someone, other than that someone standing there and breathing, as much as they need a reason to cheer someone. For the latter part, the firing angle was a lifesaver for Cody Rhodes’s current face run, which was dead in the water after the Damien Sandow betrayal at Money in the Bank. For Alberto del Rio, nobody knows why we’re supposed to be booing him other than the fact that he’s Mexican and that he takes cruel advantage of people’s injuries.
The “rich Mexican haciendero” character was way more substantial than whatever it is del Rio has going for him now, so why not take that to explain his mean streak? Tell the world that he had to be shrewd and ruthless in order to be successful in lawless Mexico. A Gus Fring-type character. I mean really, how hard could that be? Fiction makes use of stereotypes all the time, but the broadness of del Rio’s character is borderline racist.
2. Can we stop it with the match type PPVs?
The moment we schedule a Hell in a Cell to happen every October, an Elimination Chamber to happen every February, a TLC match to happen every December, we start bending the stories we tell by forcing a major plot event to happen by a certain time. Endgames either become rushed or undermined by the time it’s best to wrap the story up. (The long-running feud between Randy Orton and Daniel Bryan should’ve culminated at Survivor Series, a Big Four PPV.)
Not to mention the match or matches are forced on feuds that don’t really need them; not only are they not good fits, but they end up watering down the effect on the feuds that do need them. In this case, by the time Bryan and Orton faced off in a Hell in a Cell match in the main event, CM Punk and Ryback had already done the same earlier in the evening, and there was hardly anything new to try.
Fresh and natural. Two tenets of a good story, and we can’t have either if we continue to force our way into big matches.
1. No more impromptu matches.
This is arguably the biggest offense the WWE has been committing for the past few years.
The removal of the brand split for PPVs, the creation of a RAW “Supershow,” the extra hour given to RAW – these are all measures Vince enacted to increase the profit each show nets, because it allows for more star power on any given broadcast, and in the third item’s case, it’s more advertising revenue that goes to the company. Every business decision is all for money, and in a way, the practice of holding technically unadvertised matches is a business decision geared towards profit. (I say technically because the audience has figured out the pattern – if it’s a small angle featured somewhat prominently on television, there’s a good chance it’s making it on to the main PPV card.)
Let’s take this PPV’s slew of impromptu matches: Dean Ambrose vs. Big E Langston for the United States Championship, The Great Khali and Natalya vs. Fandango and Summer Rae in an Intergender Tag Team match, and Los Matadores vs. the Real Americans in a Tag Team match. Slobberknockers, aren’t they?
But each one of those unscheduled matches, probably except for the intergender tag match, could’ve been announced as happening on the PPV without anyone so much as batting an eyelash. But I’m thinking that the company has little to no belief on these matches’ drawing power, perhaps even going so far to think as advertising them would turn away potential buyers.
While writing and storytelling is an entirely different consideration when it comes to how the audience reacts to these matches – or the very idea of them even – these matches, in particular, aren’t ones that would lower the quality of a PPV. They’re undercard matches, for Christ’s sake – the undercard is a concept that has existed forever, and in other combat sports as well: MMA has them, boxing still has them, all down to the unknown fighters, so why be ashamed of this idea?
Here’s the thing, you see: when something nobody really wants to see (like a Great Khali match) doesn’t happen, nobody’s gonna miss it. But if you show someone that same thing without even giving them so much as a warning, they are not going to like it, giving them all the more reason to not patronize the product. Guys like Dean Ambrose, Los Matadores, and the Real Americans are talented enough between themselves to make up for the unexpected intrusion with an entertaining match, but what about the rest? They are not pleasant surprises.
It’s only going to hurt people the WWE wants to make tolerable (at the very least) – guys like Fandango and Khali and Hornswoggle, when they should be getting over as heels via the fiction, and not via the fact that nobody wants to see them.
Vince’s greed really makes him short-sighted a lot of the time. While the money-making behemoth of a company the WWE is makes all their lives comfortable, the tireless pursuit of money is dragging the creative quality down little by little and forcing a lukewarm product every week. The entire operation, at this point, is only being saved by the pure talent of their guys at the top.
Sadly, talent isn’t everything, especially without the proper management and writing. One day that raw love for the money is going to bite them back in the ass.
Images from WWE.com