Instant Reaction - WWE Raw 9/15

Overall Score - 3.0

It's been a long time since I was caught up in a whirlpool of suck as bad as Monday's Raw. The quality of the program's writing over the past month has fallen off of a cliff, resulting in meaningless storylines, matches given away for no reason, and only a handful of watchable segments each week. Tonight was the peak of the proverbial puke storm, delivering the laziest and most slapdash Raw of the past five years. Exactly two feuds are entering Night of Champions with a modicum of momentum; everything else is being written as though a five-year-old donkey was the head of the creative team.

There are certain laws of writing that should never be broken in wrestling. One of them is to never have a babyface decisively defeat his arch-rival mere days before people are expected to pay to see it. Why on earth would I spend money to see Roman Reigns defeat Seth Rollins when I witnessed him do it on Raw? Not in a flukey way, not with interference, but as a clean, straight-up win. What is the purpose of their match Sunday?

Another law of writing is that storylines need to evolve. Especially when they make no sense to begin with. A.J. and Paige skipped through another week of their pseudo-sexual rivalry while the Bella Twins continued to insert themselves in the Divas Title feud. Paige has nothing to gain by acting oddly; in all reality, neither does A.J., especially when she hasn't thrown Paige off her game after a straight month of attempting to throw her off her game. Tonight's tag team match reminded everyone that there was a Divas match at Night of Champions, but it did nothing to further the issues at hand. A graphic for the match would have had the same exact effect.

I suppose, of course, that the Divas should be considered lucky that the intrigue in their match didn't regress as the night went on. Sadly for Cesaro and Sheamus, that was the case. Their pitiful rivalry was made to look even more insignificant tonight, as the two of them played second fiddle to the Tag Team Championship storyline in a six-man tag team match that didn't even increase interest in the latter for Sunday. Reinforcing storylines is good; Even Steven booking with zero character development is not. Cramming two feuds into one segment, resulting in one of them being completely overshadowed by the match's finish, is just plain ugly. It's possible for two feuds to develop simultaneously; unfortunately, a competent writing team is required to be able to do so.

Yet another law of wrestling writing is that a talent should almost never be defined down immediately after winning the closing chapter of a major feud. However, the Powers that Be made the ingenious decision to have Bray Wyatt and his family look vastly inferior to the aging Big Show, an upper mid-carder who hasn't felt like a legitimate player in three years.

And if you were brave enough to suffer through these hideous portions of the broadcast, you would be deluged with even more repetitious garbage that was rehashed from prior pay-per-views (Naomi vs. Cameron) and shows that aired three nights ago (Ziggler-Miz tag match). There were exactly two moments of this show that were definite successes, the first of which being John Cena's brawl with Brock Lesnar. He didn't dismantle the Beast, but he did knock him down. While Lesnar wasn't made out to look weak all of a sudden, Cena did show that Lesnar's hubris can be his downfall, and that he can be beaten. Simple and effective storytelling (aside from the 15 minutes of drivel about Cena embracing his "dark side").

The other strong point of the show? The main event, which featured Mark Henry "defending" the USA from Rusev. It's been done a half-dozen times before on Raw, but the crowd was hot for Mark Henry taking Rusev down a notch. These two aspects of the show (which, in total, made up about 15 minutes of the nearly 200-minute broadcast) were the only ones to develop characters and stories while building intrigue for Night of Champions. Nothing else evolved tonight. Roman Reigns is still a cardboard cut-out character who speaks in short sentences and exhibits no personality of his own. Chris Jericho, lost in upper mid-card hell after a disappointing feud with Bray Wyatt, didn't even confront his opponent for Night of Champions. Who is he facing again? Yeah, not much of a pre-PPV card rundown.

In the past 15 years, Raw has devolved from a must-see show to a why-do-I-see-this show. Stories are paced atrociously, the wrestling is fine but only exists to fill time, and characters are stale as toast.

Any questions or comments? Message me on Twitter @BTuckertorch!

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