Previously on the Best and Worst of Smackdown: The Miz wants to take Neville under his wing and give him a personality (via USA Network’s “Donny”) and R-Truth is accidentally a member of the Wyatt Family. Also, they’re building to the upcoming WWE TLC: Tables, Ladders and Chairs pay-per-view by having all the good guys team up against all the bad guys as many times as possible. You know, like Survivor Series. After Sunday, I hope they build to Royal Rumble by having everyone on Smackdown attack each other with ladders.
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And now, the Best and Worst of WWE Smackdown for Dec. 10, 2015.
Best: Starting The Show With A Match
As a heads up, there isn’t a lot about this week’s Smackdown that I enjoyed. There are rumors of “major changes” coming soon and the show’s moving to USA in January, so it feels very much like … well, remember NXT Redemption? It started off as the fifth season of a bad game show and ended up a weird, esoteric cult favorite, but in the middle (and arguably, at the very end) it felt like a wrestling show performed for a company that had no idea it existed. It was like, the least offensive wrestling possible so nobody would notice and take it away. That’s Smackdown right now. It’s the most basic idea of “Smackdown,” filling a spot until the changes come. Nothing’s gonna matter in a few weeks anyway.
That said, the show opened with Roman Reigns vs. Alberto Del Rio, and I liked two things about it:
1. It made the show open with a wrestling match, which is a rare treasure for Smackdown. I mean, the match ended with a double disqualification to set up a tag team match for later in the night (aka the most Smackdown thing ever), but at least they used “wrestling” to tell the story instead of bad script-reading.
2. Reigns and Del Rio work really well together. I loved their Survivor Series WWE World Heavyweight Championship tournament semi-finals match, and while this one was nowhere near as good as that one (and only existed to help us get to the post-match), it was fun while it lasted. As I’ve said a few times, Reigns’ greatest strength as a wrestler is his penchant for leaning into offense to make it look good, and Del Rio’s one of those guys who sorta lives or dies based on how hard his opponent is comfortable getting hit. It’s why Del Rio works well with guys like Cena and Sheamus, and not so well with guys like Sin Cara. Well, it’s one of the reasons.
So yeah, good stuff. There isn’t much more of that this week, so if you aren’t interested in a thousand additional words of “oh my god what are they doing,” I’ll try to wrap it up in the next section.
Worst: A Night Of Not Making Your Champions (Or Challengers) Look Strong Before A Pay-Per-View
This is the story of the night.
TLC is this Sunday. One of WWE’s biggest problems in cultivating an audience that’s excited about the product and not just there to clap happily about seeing wrestlers in person is that they set up these big, marquee matches, and then spend a month devaluing them as much as possible. They not only overexpose the talent involved by having them wrestle top-level opponents every week, but they often wrestle their advertised marquee opponents, and oftentimes those matches have clean victories. So basically what they’re doing is asking you to pay for a match you’ve already seen half a dozen times for free. By doing the match that many times, you’ve seen all possible outcomes. You’ve seen the face win, you’ve seen the heel win, you’ve seen one of them win by cheating, you’ve seen the comeuppance. You’ve had five servings of dessert, and the pay-per-view tries to sell you soft-serve.
When they don’t do the matches themselves, they have the champions (or the major championship challengers) lose matches. I guess their rationale is that they want to create the illusion that the champion might lose, but I think that’s severely overestimating how much people like seeing title changes. That’s fun, but if you create a world where the title changes don’t matter and being the champion doesn’t actually make you better than any of your challengers, what’s the point?
On Smackdown, and sorry for jumping ahead to the rest of the show, we had multiple instances of this. The New Day is defending their Tag Team Championship against The Usos and the Lucha Dragons at TLC. On Raw, the Lucha Dragons beat The New Day in a match. On Smackdown, the Lucha Dragons beat the New Day in a match. We’ve seen one of the challengers at the PPV defeat the champions twice in a row. The only thing keeping the Dragons from being the champions is the arbitrary decision made by powerful ghosts that these are non-title matches. That’s it. Similarly, WWE’s building a TLC match between Roman Reigns and Sheamus. On Raw, Roman opened the show by pinning Sheamus clean in the middle of the ring, and ended the night by beating him up and spearing him through a table. That means the two things you’d want to see happen at the PPV — Roman pinning Sheamus, and Sheamus getting beaten up with weapons — has already happened. Why do you want to see that again?
That’s not all. Rusev is supposed to have a match against Ryback. On this show, Ryback beats a tag team by himself to show how strong he is. The only problem is that Rusev and Ryback already had a match on Raw, which ended in a double count-out and Rusev winning the fight. Is a clean pinfall in a match the payoff, when you’ve already seen a brawl outside the ring and the bad guy winning with dominance? Is seeing the inverse of that worth ten bucks? It just keeps going. Paige has a Divas Championship match at TLC. Becky Lynch is involved in the feud, but has already cut a promo about how she’s not on the show, and will be watching from home. On Smackdown, Becky Lynch defeats Paige, thanks in part to the Divas Champion, who just cheated Becky Lynch out of a match on Raw. Everyone’s sorta vaguely cheating everyone and everybody’s pinning everybody, and you haven’t actually saved anything to make TLC a thing people would want to see. You’re just setting up match types in a video game, and not even the new one. It’s the same game we’ve been playing for years. The new games are just different skins on the old.
So that’s where we are. The begrudging acceptance that Smackdown doesn’t matter, even when it’s the go-home show to your last pay-per-view of the year. Every one of these episodes is an opportunity to tell a story. The argument that five hours of live TV is too much to execute perfectly starts to crack when you’re only doing one kind of 15-minute story, and you’re doing it over and over.
It’s Time To Move Beyond The ‘Superstar Knows How Sports-Entertainment Contract Signings Work’ Joke
I didn’t want to give this a Worst because it wasn’t bad, but it’s time to move past this joke.
WWE contract signings usually end with people fighting. Wrestlers started picking up on that a few years ago, and the first … well, several instances of a wrestler saying, “hey, I know how contract signings work, let’s fight!” were cute. It was a knowing wink at one of WWE’s most overused tropes. Now, the acknowledgment of the trope IS the trope. Dean Ambrose says he knows contract signings end in a fight because Dean Ambrose ALWAYS says he knows contract signings end in a fight. It’s not a joke anymore. You’re just openly admitting that your scenario is bullsh*t.
I hate that this sounds so negative, because I don’t mean it to be. It’s just an attempt to point out how lazy this entire episode is, and how easily they could fix it. It’s not a matter of making things perfect, it’s just seeing what you do every single week and not doing it every single week. Tropes are tropes for a reason, you know? Birthday cakes in faces became a thing because wrestling crowds loved birthday cakes in faces. The ECW style of bleeding one match into another, that worked. A GM making a singles match a tag match due to interference exists because it used to be great. These things — even contract signings — can still work, you just have to put space between them, and not pull a Glee-style wink wink nudge nudge every time you take the easy way out. Acknowledging your lazy storytelling decision doesn’t suddenly make it thoughtful.
As for the signing itself, it … almost worked? Ambrose was frustrated that Kevin Owens sent out his attorney to sign the contract, and it’s revealed to be a setup for an Owens attack. The only problem is that Owens doesn’t really take advantage of the surprise, he just runs into the ring suddenly. There isn’t a distraction or anything, he just runs up and they start fighting. It’s A-to-B-to-C without a lot of thought put into B. The end result is Owens and Ambrose fighting, which is great, and Owens getting to yell things about how Ambrose attacked an innocent man, but just taking a few minutes to say, “okay, how do we make this make more sense” really could’ve helped.
Worst: Derisive TMZ Discussions And Handicap Match Victories
Rusev and Lana are on commentary for Ryback’s handicap match against The Ascension. I’m not going to ramble on for three paragraphs about what a dick move WWE continues to pull on Konnor and Viktor because they’re The Ascension, and sometimes you’ve got to let those hard-to-reach chips go.
Anyway, Rusev and Lana are on commentary and Lawler chimes in with (and I’m paraphrasing), “maybe TMZ will cover your wedding like they covered your engagement.” The way he says “your engagement” is SO SPITEFUL. Dripping with malice. Rusev and Lana getting real-life engaged in the middle of a fictional story about how they’d broken up has made WWE SO MAD, you guys. They’re wearing it on their sleeve. The only payoff is “Rusev is an idiot” and “Lana is a whore,” and neither of those things have to happen. You could’ve just rolled with it and acknowledged the difference between these performers’ real lives and on-camera characters — something you do ALL THE TIME, especially on the Network — or you could just realize the money to be made from Lana and Rusev is them as an evil Russian power couple. You aren’t gonna make money on “Lana says she didn’t have sex with her boyfriend, but she PROBABLY DID.” There isn’t a cool or fun way for that to end. It’s just weird.
That’s my problem with so much of WWE’s content right now. They seem to actively be choosing the worst-case scenario. The Ascension aren’t working, so you have them lose to Ryback. Ryback’s not really working either, so you stick him in this feud with Rusev that doesn’t get either of them over. Rusev made you mad, so you throw him and Lana under the bus and saddle them with Ryback for a month. You’re wasting all this money and talent and TV time on stuff you know doesn’t work, and we can all see you going through the motions. That’s frustrating. You don’t want to hang these people out to dry, but you also don’t want to spend six months angrily forcing a square peg through a round hole.
Worst: Finally, A Fresh Matchup
speaking of holes
Raise your hand if you wanted to see another Dolph Ziggler vs. Tyler Breeze match. They’re all pretty good, right? They should be a thing we look forward to. If you scroll through the YouTube comments, your core audience has turned your tendency to run the same match over and over until we’re sick of seeing it into a running, observational joke. It’s not just a thing smarks think anymore.
Ziggler can be great. Breeze can be great. Summer can be great. Instead of anybody being ANYTHING, we’re doing this. I can’t believe that “don’t do the exact same show every week” is a thing that needs to be explained.
Worst: “Teammates? FRIENDS?” Or,
Best: Becky Lynch Wins
To say something positive (and again, I’m sorry I can’t be more positive about this week’s show), Becky Lynch got a win. That’s good. Becky’s a good wrestler, and she’s honestly never had an opportunity to be the focus of something. NXT made her the babyface challenger for exactly one cycle and it got her over so hard the crowd was singing her entrance theme.
To say … other things, this week’s Paige vs. Becky Lynch match was good while it lasted, but sadly only existed to set up a lot of the same problems the Divas division’s been going through for the past month. The alignments still don’t make sense. As mentioned, Charlotte, Becky and Paige were on a team together. Paige turned on them, twice, leaving it as Paige vs. Becky and Charlotte. Becky decided to challenge Charlotte to a friendly match, so Charlotte cheated to beat her and chastised her about being spineless and gullible. So that left Charlotte vs. Becky vs. Paige, right? Only, Paige was telling Becky the truth about Charlotte: that she was only in this for herself, and only existed on WWE’s radar because of her dad. Charlotte said that wasn’t true, and responded by BRINGING OUT HER DAD ALL THE TIME. Paige insulted Charlotte’s dead brother, which turned CHARLOTTE heel somehow, and now Charlotte is showing up to distract Paige and help Becky win the match. That sets up … another Paige vs. Charlotte match, with Becky not involved at all.
Does any of that make sense? It’s like the longer they go, the less sense it makes. Booker T responding to the recap of the story by saying, “TEAMMATES? FRIENDS??” like it’s the first time he’s heard about it kinda sums it up.
Worst: That Awkward Moment When King Take-a-pin Doesn’t Take The Pin
Finally, we get the payoff to the show-opening match. It’s also the payoff to all the paragraphs I’ve been writing.
Roman’s team defeats the League of Nations, because of course they do. Let’s think about how that relates to TLC, shall we? Sheamus is the WWE World Heavyweight Champion, and he’s got a match against Roman at TLC. Rusev has a match at TLC, and so does Del Rio. The only person on the team that doesn’t have a match is King Barrett, and he’s KING BARRETT, so you have him take the pin, right? Instead of following that logic and attempting to keep SOMEBODY strong for TLC, Reigns pins Rusev with a spear.
The match was fine, because the match is always fine, but WWE desperately needs to refocus. The old internet argument is that bad segments were getting in the way of good wrestling. Now, looking at it as a standalone thing, there’s good-to-great wrestling on almost every episode of every WWE TV show. All of them. The bad segments are still bad, but they aren’t the problem … the problem is that the good wrestling isn’t happening for a reason, and almost always feels like a way to kill time before the finish, which is the finish you were gonna put on the bad match. See what I’m saying? If these are the stories they want to tell, they could still be in that late-’90s crash TV style of programming with 3-minute matches and 35-second Diva messes and hit all these story points. They aren’t allowing the talent and the wrestling and the in-ring storytelling to enhance anything. They exist independently of one another. It’s why there’s so much great selling in matches, and why the seller almost always forgets it for the finish. It’s like NXT and Raw happening at the same time.
These Family vs. League of Nations matches are like the men’s equivalent of the Divas revolution. It’s great that you’re all on teams and fighting, but what are you fighting for? What happens if you win? Anything? Is it going anywhere? Does it get paid off somehow?
All I can hope is that they’ve got something new and exciting planned for the Road To WrestleMania, or WrestleMania 32 is some sort of hard reset for the company as a whole. The problems are complex, but some of them are very easy. Look at what you’re doing. See if you’ve done it before, and how much you’ve done it recently. Try harder than the first draft. Don’t break these talented performers going through the motions of a show that isn’t designed to make them seem special.
Or don’t do any of that, and let’s see where it goes. Is that the answer? Shrugging and giving up? How many of us have to do that?
