Really, What the Hell Happened with WWE This Year?
by David Bixenspan (@davidbix) T
his week, for no discernible reason other than, perhaps, the show being a miserable way to spend three hours even if you're making fun of it on Twitter the whole time, Monday Night Raw was watched by 3.51 million viewers, the lowest non-holiday rating in two years and one of the lowest non-holiday ratings ever. What makes the number extra scary is that it was the night after a pay-per-view, TLC. Or TLCS. Or whatever it was called this year with the addition of a STAIRS MATCH (make sure to imagine "stairs match" in Bryan's voice).
Whether or not there's any kind of pattern here is something we'll learn next week. But if there is, should this really shock anyone?
When 2014 started, WWE was kind of jumbled, but there was hope. Creatively, things were really weird. Just a few weeks earlier, they had shot a tremendous angle to get the ball rolling for WrestleMania, but Daniel Bryan wasn't in the main event picture and was stuck having given himself over to Bray Wyatt. Still, business was looking up because it was time to announce the WWE Network launch.
It seems completely ridiculous now, but on January 8 during the WWE Network announcement at CES, it felt like they were on the verge of a new boom period. Lapsed fans, especially MMA journalists, were going completely nuts on Twitter. The mainstream and tech media coverage was glowing. UFC, who had launched a completely half-baked UFC Fight Pass that week, was perceived to have been completely embarrassed and shown up by WWE. The idea that a huge swath of lapsed fans would get the network to check out old shows, be wowed by WrestleMania, and stick around afterwards was not out of the question.
It took a few weeks, CM Punk going home, and a completely ridiculous Royal Rumble, but the booking turned around. Not only was Daniel Bryan being set up as the new top babyface, but Batista was turned heel, Randy Orton was kept off TV to keep him from getting impossibly stale before WrestleMania, The Shield was freshened up as a de facto babyface group, and Cesaro was suddenly getting a huge push while being set up for a babyface turn. From the point when they changed their plans for Daniel Bryan and the Mania main event (whenever they stopped the "goat face" stuff with Bryan) through the Raw after WrestleMania was some of the best TV they've put on in a very long time, with great angles, great matches (especially featuring Cesaro), and incredibly hot crowds. It felt like the company was really picking up steam. Even before that, Daniel Bryan's beatdown of Bray Wyatt in a cage on the Raw after the network announcement was an incredibly hot angle that, for lack of a better term, felt like boom period wrestling.
Then WWE Network launched. The first week (which was, in theory, free, but the free option was sort of obscured) was filled with technical issues, which wasn't a huge surprise, but a lot of people got fed up quickly. Worse, and there's never been an explanation why this happened, the Xbox 360 app for the network didn't work for almost the entire first month of its existence. Instead of creating a completely new, separate WWE app, they just updated the app that already existed on the console for pay-per-view events. The app was updated for the launch and promptly rejected all login attempts. In hindsight, and I don't know why none of us considered this more, it's entirely possible WWE was siphoning subscribers at a rapid clip during the first few weeks and they never came back. For a ton of people, the game console is the only TV-connected streaming device they have, and most aren't going to have more than one capable console. How the hell they released such a broken app (I don't recall any anecdotal stories of it actually working before the fix) I have no idea, but it would only make sense that they completely lost the trust of those subscribers during that period. Since the first official number we have is the number of active subscriptions the day after WrestleMania, we don't know. Only WWE does.
WrestleMania 30 in New Orleans was great, probably the best Mania since WrestleMania 24 in Orlando. Without the Daniel Bryan story, it would be among the worst ever—there would have been a revolt for a Randy Orton vs. Batista main event, especially if it happened after Brock Lesnar ended The Undertaker's streak. Raw the next night was great. The night after that,at the SmackDown taping, with WWE having moved on from New Orleans and the travelling fans, we got the first hint that WWE hadn't found its magic long-term. To any sane wrestling fan, Cesaro had turned babyface over the weekend when he split from Jack Swagger and Zeb Colter before winning the Andre the Giant Memorial Battle Royal the same night. He had taken on Paul Heyman as his new manager on Raw, but it was treated as a babyface move. On SmackDown, that turned out to be nothing more than a one-night concession to the international gathering of smart marks in attendance at Raw, as he was back to being a full heel. After doing an actual babyface turn.
So much for building up goodwill. Cesaro became secondary to Heyman orating about Brock Lesnar and was completely killed off. There were hints dropped that it was leading to Cesaro actually turning babyface for a match with Lesnar, but that never went anywhere. It was theorized by some that he was going to win the Money in the Bank contract and cash it in on Lesnar, but there's no indication that was ever planned, and those hopes went out the window when his ladder match became a title match when Daniel Bryan vacated the title.
This just isn't the same company that had a detail-obsessed Vince McMahon lording over everything, demanding that every empty seat be filled when photos were touched up. We've had some WCW level incompetence when it comes to the booking, like Jack Swagger having to drop out of the Survivor Series main event due to injury, only to wrestle at Survivor Series anyway. Daniel Bryan was stripped of the WWE World Heavyweight Championship due to inactivity, but Brock Lesnar wasn't. That actually could have been played up as a heel move to put heat on The Authority, but it was just ignored.
It's not like nobody in the company is capable of great detail work on the creative side: Kevin Owens' turn on Sami Zayn coming right after the copyright notice flashed at NXT's big show was a stroke of brilliance, because everyone watching thought they were "safe." It's not even that one side is necessarily better or more creative or has better ideas, as it is that the writing team is full of wrestling geeks pushing for the right thing. The problem is that there are two dozen of them pushing these ideas on a temperamental, forgetful, 69-year-old man. Ryan Ward writing the NXT shows with Paul Levesque signing off on them is just a cleaner process. How apropos is it that in 2014, the year of Too Many Cooks, one of the biggest problems with WWE is too many cooks? Although Vince is the bigger problem.
On that note, TLCS was a mess that makes you wonder if anyone left in WWE knows how to lay out a card. There were stunt matches up and down the card, and the opener had the biggest stunts. The crowd was dead for most of the show. How could the company that laid out this year's WrestleMania be the one that put on TLCS? Well, WrestleMania was produced by Paul Levesque.
Having said all that, nothing sums up WWE in 2014 more than Seth Rollins vs. Dean Ambrose at Battleground where, for lack of a better term, WWE false advertised one of the most anticipated PPV matches of the year. The reasoning was about as sound as it could be for that kind of thing: they needed to draw out the program. The execution was bizarre because it led to several brawls between the two that went everywhere and were kind of fun. Why they did it that way when they could have just had the match quickly break down into brawls, I have no idea.
They made people feel ripped off when they didn't have to. That's WWE in 2014.
