Matthew Widdis: What do you do with a problem like RAW? Over the past few years, the Monday night flagship has been taking on water and nobody (at least nobody in a position to do anything about it) has figured out how to correct it. Every week they put wagyu filet mignon on the menu and, every week, they serve it to us burnt.
Is it because of the three hour run time? Has it been the fault of showrunners Vince/Stephanie/Kevin Dunn? Is it the focus on and handling of Roman/Brock/Cena/Punk? Is it the market or the changing times that have brought us the PG (or PC) era? Is it the fans? It is all of these things to a varying degree, creating a sour sangria of suck ass.
The show has changed its structure over the years. Two hours is a night of entertainment. Three hours is an exponentially bigger commitment and you have to make sure that the commitment doesn’t become a chore.
In the days of the three hour WCW Monday Nitro, Kevin Sullivan and Dusty Rhodes had worked out the correct formula for the “three ring circus approach.” By having cruiserweights and comedy (done right) for part of the show along with the pageantry and more serious storylines and culminating in a main event that felt like it had real repercussion on the entire promotion, they were able to service individual tastes and broad appeal.
RAW seems to have lost its recipe for what made it number one and it has nothing to do with a lack of lingerie matches, beer trucks, and toilet humor. RAW is 50% longer than Smackdown and it seems like it’s mostly filler. They need to make us care and that is always better with “show” as opposed to “tell.”
It seems like, on Smackdown, things happen more organically. Becky Lynch wasn’t supposed to be the talk of industry (or a face) when she changed persona but they struck when the iron was hot and now she is. When Alexa Bliss started to generate a buzz, RAW didn’t have a “Last Woman Standing” match to create an elevating feud. Instead they had Bayley buried in a squash match to her in front of The Hugger’s hometown crowd. On RAW, Braun Strowman caught fire but Roman Reigns was the one poised to be the plucky underdog who dethroned Brock Lesnar… until contract time when Brock Lesnar would stretch that out for another year or so each time.
They’ve fallen back on familiar commodities like Brock Lesnar, John Cena, Goldberg, and The Rock to make the “A” show special. By doing so, they’ve shown a lack of confidence in talent like Dolph Ziggler, Braun Strowman, Finn Balor, and Bray Wyatt. Even Roman Reigns spent four years playing a watered-down version of The Rock while jobbing to Lesnar instead of whatever he could have been. The fact that they won’t do what is needed to elevate a roster of roughly one hundred of the best performers in the world is a sin. Money invested can be lost or grown. Money under the mattress never generates returns.
It’s easy to dump that on Vince McMahon… and it would be silly not to. He’s seen it to be true over and over again over nearly 40 years: business is best when “the guy” stands out in a crowded airport, you work the crowd instead of the crowd working you, and crossover appeal puts butts in seats. When torn between serving two masters, the one that signs billion dollar contracts for distribution rights is the hand you don’t bite. If that’s the one that wants household names and very little controversy or grief from their standards and practices department, you give them what they want.
The problem is that the networks won’t be shelling out big money for long if the ratings continue to drop. RAW is averaging about 2.3 million viewers. That’s about what TNA was doing at their peak. They’re losing long-time fans and casuals, spork-level edginess or any type of potential controversy. They need to make a decision: do they want to be the worldwide leader in sports entertainment or do they want to be the paper tiger of basic cable?
