Any other longterm fans starting to feel alienated by the current fanbase?

[Loss]

Is it 1982-1983 Memphis? 1984-1986 Mid South/UWF? 1985-1986 JCP? 1988 Continental? 1989 or 1992 WCW? 1997 WWF? There have been a lot of great periods for angle-driven TV wrestling with strong matches here and there.

[Grimmas]

Is it 1982-1983 Memphis? 1984-1986 Mid South/UWF? 1985-1986 JCP? 1988 Continental? 1989 or 1992 WCW? 1997 WWF? There have been a lot of great periods for angle-driven TV wrestling with strong matches here and there.

The only TV of those I watched is 97 WWF. 97 TV had better top program, but SDLive is easily better bottom to top. Everything on the show is good and everyone is being used. There is three different women's feuds all progressing weekly, even.

[Herodes]

Grimmas, watch more 80s mid south, 80s and 90s Memphis, Georgia, JCP, WCW, World Class, USWA Texas, SMW, Southeastern before making such a ridiculous statement. Smackdown may be a decent show after years of massively lowered standards and expectations based on tv formats that haven't significantly changed since the late 90s where fundamental tenets such as feuds progressing and good promos are considered exceptional rather than expected. It's a nothing show in the grand scheme of things.

[Herodes]

And as a Lucha fan, watch weekly Lucha tv from 89 to 2005

[JerryvonKramer]

I hate seeing my beloved 80s-early 90s WWF sold so short in these convos. The most fully realised, integrated, self-contained universe in wrestling history, and I include Memphis in that.

 

I don't believe I could have done a show like Letters from Kayfabe for any other promotion or period. The lore and world simply aren't deep enough. Mr Fuji having a party with the Barbarian deep. Jesse Ventura: undercover reporter deep. Ian Mooney deep.

 

WWF always sold so short

[goc]

Smackdown is as good as the best wrestling in history? Is that even possible when promos are scripted and matches are worked in such a limiting style?

Seems like you should actually watch it and decide for yourself considering pretty much all the talk about Smackdown these days is positive and the only real complaint is they could use a few more top guys.

 

Grimmas, watch more 80s mid south, 80s and 90s Memphis, Georgia, JCP, WCW, World Class, USWA Texas, SMW, Southeastern before making such a ridiculous statement. Smackdown may be a decent show after years of massively lowered standards and expectations based on tv formats that haven't significantly changed since the late 90s where fundamental tenets such as feuds progressing and good promos are considered exceptional rather than expected. It's a nothing show in the grand scheme of things.

I have seen a lot of that 80s stuff and I think post-split Smackdown absolutely belongs in the same conversation. I'm the biggest Southeastern/Continental drum beater on this board (or maybe just the loudest if you factor in KrisZ and his awesome Exile series on Continental) and one of the reasons I think Smackdown is so good right now is that it shares a lot of the same traits that made Alabama rasslin so good. I'm not going to say it's THE BEST but it's very good especially when you factor in Talking Smack as part of the overall package.

[Loss]

He's the first person to say it's as good as any wrestling ever, and that's the only part I'm questioning. And I'm just confirming, not even disagreeing.

[Grimmas]

Grimmas, watch more 80s mid south, 80s and 90s Memphis, Georgia, JCP, WCW, World Class, USWA Texas, SMW, Southeastern before making such a ridiculous statement. Smackdown may be a decent show after years of massively lowered standards and expectations based on tv formats that haven't significantly changed since the late 90s where fundamental tenets such as feuds progressing and good promos are considered exceptional rather than expected. It's a nothing show in the grand scheme of things.

All the 80s TV I have watched has lots of jobber matches.

[Dylan Waco]

Smackdown is as good as the best wrestling in history? Is that even possible when promos are scripted and matches are worked in such a limiting style?

 

It's not the best, but if you watch Talking Smack too the scripting feels really toned down there and adds dramatically to the overall package. I'm off the opinion that territory era fans who don't like SD/Talking Smack or CWF have probably just seen wrestling pass them by completely because you aren't going to get anything closer in this era.

[goc]

 

Smackdown is as good as the best wrestling in history? Is that even possible when promos are scripted and matches are worked in such a limiting style?

 

It's not the best, but if you watch Talking Smack too the scripting feels really toned down there and adds dramatically to the overall package. I'm off the opinion that territory era fans who don't like SD/Talking Smack or CWF have probably just seen wrestling pass them by completely because you aren't going to get anything closer in this era.

 

Definitely agree with this. Smackdown + Talking Smack is like the best possible melding of an 80s territory and a modern WWE TV product.

[stro]

The overrating of Smackdown is hilarious. Give it an extra hour and people would hate it just as much as Raw, because it still has the same issues (rematches, long matches for the sake of long matches, overly scripted promos, GM bullshit that everyone is sick to death of, extremely formulaic TV matches).

 

People made up their minds before the draft even happened that SD was the better show, and they doubled down even in the first few months when SD was TERRIBLE and Raw as clearly the far better show. The last decade or so of TV has been so bland, forgettable, or terrible on a week to week basis that a show that is consistently decent enough is proclaimed as this incredible show with so many layers and *insert any southern territory* booking. Like, Smackdown is not a show where you watch every week and can't wait for it to end. It's just a decent wrestling show, much like NXT was in 2012-2014. Nothing blow away, just a simple wrestling show that doesn't suck.

[Strummer]

Shane has been on the show a handful of times since the summer and Bryan is barely on unless he's doing something with Miz

[Grimmas]

Pretty clear stro doesn't watch sd.

[Dylan Waco]

The overrating of Smackdown is hilarious. Give it an extra hour and people would hate it just as much as Raw, because it still has the same issues (rematches, long matches for the sake of long matches, overly scripted promos, GM bullshit that everyone is sick to death of, extremely formulaic TV matches).

 

People made up their minds before the draft even happened that SD was the better show, and they doubled down even in the first few months when SD was TERRIBLE and Raw as clearly the far better show. The last decade or so of TV has been so bland, forgettable, or terrible on a week to week basis that a show that is consistently decent enough is proclaimed as this incredible show with so many layers and *insert any southern territory* booking. Like, Smackdown is not a show where you watch every week and can't wait for it to end. It's just a decent wrestling show, much like NXT was in 2012-2014. Nothing blow away, just a simple wrestling show that doesn't suck.

 

I prefer a lot of WWECW to modern SD but not because of the storytelling really. I myself have said it's been overrated in some quarters, and it has been, but it's been very good for a lot of people who were otherwise doomed to fail and/or in dire situations. People may have been high on SD before the draft but the initial aftermath the overwhelming consensus was that SD got fucked and would be a disaster of a show due to star power. Oops.

[goc]

Yea go back and read the reactions after the first week of the brand split. It was all doom and gloom for Smackdown, with people saying they got totally fucked in the draft and the whole brand split experiment would be short lived because of it. Smackdown love didn't really start until after they had their first PPV, which everyone expected to be not very good.

[Grimmas]

Yea go back and read the reactions after the first week of the brand split. It was all doom and gloom for Smackdown, with people saying they got totally fucked in the draft and the whole brand split experiment would be short lived because of it.

I was one of those. They were fucked in the draft. The booking has made the show better.

[flyonthewall2983]

What started to alienate me was the amount of programming that began to accumulate for both WWF and WCW in the late 90's. 1997 was the peak year of the Monday Night Wars as far as I'm concerned, but it was also the first year both companies had major PPV's every month of the year. Through the sheer luck of having PPV scramble, I was able to watch/hear in on stuff, but more importantly there was Monday nights. And that was fine. The eventual additions of Thunder and Smackdown! threw me a little bit (especially as my county didn't have UPN, we had to hear about Smackdown! results), and a malaise started to sit in that I think can happen with a lot of teenage fans. I think if I'd been 5 or 10 years older, I probably would have moved on from it completely by then.

 

Of all the things I hated about the attitude era, I think the empowerment of the audience was the worst thing to come out of it. First it started with annoying memes ("What!", "You suck" to the tune of Kurt Angle's music), then later on when the "let's go Cena/Cena sucks" thing happened, I hated that too. But that's obviously more critical to what we're talking about here because it affected the perception of him by everyone over a certain age, who longed for the kind of vulgar everyman Steve Austin was. Not someone who I think is probably the purest babyface character I've ever seen.

 

Both of those things combined with the slavish attention people draw to social media (for what it's worth I post sometimes on SquaredCircle and in my experience it's not all as bad as it seems), has definitely been the major factors in alienating me from the current product. Equal to that for me would be not having a viable and palatable alternative like WCW was in the 90's. And as heavily critical as I can be of him, these are things that aren't inherently Vince's fault. He saw the need for more television because his company was getting hot again, and he of course can't control the fans, hard as he seems to try.

[stro]

Pretty clear stro doesn't watch sd.

I do watch at least one or two eps a month and clips, plus Talking Smack. I follow SD much more than Raw. SD has Bryan on about as much as Raw has Steph on, and then Bryan gets 20-30 minutes on Talking Smack to complain about his job and put talent on the spot with questions that can ruin them politically if they go to hard in one direction. And often outright shitting on the booking anyway. In the first 3-4 months, Bryan started and ended almost every show. They have him as the GM who makes matches in the middle of the show and books petty matches against talent he doesn't get along with. It's the same thing that people have been complaining about Stephanie doing for years, but he's doing it to heels.

 

At the same time, the SD is brutally thin, leading to Becky vs Bliss 8 times since August, AJ Styles (probably the hottest guy in the company) having all of 2 matches since August that weren't against Dean Ambrose or James Ellsworth (and one of them was at SS which featured both Dean and Ellsworth in the match), and Miz vs Ziggler 5 times since September eventhough they've already had 2 multimonth long feuds in the past.

 

All the issues of Raw are present on SD, but they have the luxury of not having to stretch their show out for another hour. Raw would probably be a pretty decent weekly show if it was back to 2 hours as well. I doubt people would be proclaiming it perhaps the greatest wrestling show of all time even if it actually was, because Raw droolz, SD rulez has been the talking point since the original draft.

 

You gotta stop with this "anyone whose view doesn't line up with mine obviously isn't watching/is dumb" stuff. It's terrible for discussion. I see in SD what everyone hates about Raw, but to a lesser degree. I wouldn't see anything if I wasn't following and watching.

[BigBadMick]

If we're discussing current day Smackdown, doesn't WWF tv from approximately Feb-Sep 2000 deserve a mention?

 

The product was red hot, with great main eventers in Rock, HHH and Foley, and great strides being taken up the card by Benoit, Jericho and Angle. As well as a tag team revival (granted, a lot of that was stunt ladder matches etc, but it was hot as hell at the time), and solid to exceptional work up and down the card. Wasn't the head writer at the time praised for his sense of continuity and storyboarding each character's interactions to maintain order?

 

The only possible drawback in all this was match length - weren't they still operating a no-matches-thru-commercial-breaks system on Raw and Smackdown?

[Grimmas]

 

Pretty clear stro doesn't watch sd.

I do watch at least one or two eps a month and clips, plus Talking Smack. I follow SD much more than Raw. SD has Bryan on about as much as Raw has Steph on, and then Bryan gets 20-30 minutes on Talking Smack to complain about his job and put talent on the spot with questions that can ruin them politically if they go to hard in one direction. And often outright shitting on the booking anyway. In the first 3-4 months, Bryan started and ended almost every show. They have him as the GM who makes matches in the middle of the show and books petty matches against talent he doesn't get along with. It's the same thing that people have been complaining about Stephanie doing for years, but he's doing it to heels.

 

At the same time, the SD is brutally thin, leading to Becky vs Bliss 8 times since August, AJ Styles (probably the hottest guy in the company) having all of 2 matches since August that weren't against Dean Ambrose or James Ellsworth (and one of them was at SS which featured both Dean and Ellsworth in the match), and Miz vs Ziggler 5 times since September eventhough they've already had 2 multimonth long feuds in the past.

 

All the issues of Raw are present on SD, but they have the luxury of not having to stretch their show out for another hour. Raw would probably be a pretty decent weekly show if it was back to 2 hours as well. I doubt people would be proclaiming it perhaps the greatest wrestling show of all time even if it actually was, because Raw droolz, SD rulez has been the talking point since the original draft.

 

You gotta stop with this "anyone whose view doesn't line up with mine obviously isn't watching/is dumb" stuff. It's terrible for discussion. I see in SD what everyone hates about Raw, but to a lesser degree. I wouldn't see anything if I wasn't following and watching.

 

The issues you are pointing out don't really exist.

 

Bryan doesn't dominate the show. Those matches are done a few times, because they are feuding and it's a logical progression. None of it feels like what you are saying.

 

By the way SD is 2.5 hours, if you include Talking Smack. Thats only 30 minutes shorter with one less division.

 

Yet, SD can have 3 women feuds at a time and Raw can have 1. SD can have a compelling tag division with multiple challengers, Raw only have two teams at a time, etc...

 

Time is not the issue here.

[stro]

I didn't say he dominated the show. Just like Stephanie doesn't dominate Raw, but you'd think she does if you just read what people say every week. He has the same role as Steph/Foley, in the very same manner. Why it's okay on SD but not on Raw is anyone's guess. You don't feel the way I feel about SD. I've said SD is clearly a better show and a very decent weekly show. It still has the same issues as Raw, just not as severe. Is that really a controversial thing to think? Time isn't the only issue, and I didn't say it was the only issue, just like I didn't say Bryan dominated the show. If you're going to come at me in every thread, at least characterize what I'm saying properly instead of extrapolating and putting words in my mouth.

[Grimmas]

I didn't say he dominated the show. Just like Stephanie doesn't dominate Raw, but you'd think she does if you just read what people say every week. He has the same role as Steph/Foley, in the very same manner. Why it's okay on SD but not on Raw is anyone's guess. You don't feel the way I feel about SD. I've said SD is clearly a better show and a very decent weekly show. It still has the same issues as Raw, just not as severe. Is that really a controversial thing to think? Time isn't the only issue, and I didn't say it was the only issue, just like I didn't say Bryan dominated the show. If you're going to come at me in every thread, at least characterize what I'm saying properly instead of extrapolating and putting words in my mouth.

You don't see the difference between Steph/Foley and Shane/Bryan? If you don't see that, I don't know what to tell you, but they are nothing alike.

 

Yes, SD has issues. There is no show in history without issues.

 

I'm not putting words in your mouth, I'm just trying to figure out what you actually mean, because the words don't match reality.

[stro]

Can you write me a check list of things so I make sure what I see lines up with what you see so people can talk about shit on this board again. I have my opinions about wrestling. You have yours. Can we leave it at that? Or are you planning on telling me I'm a troll or wrong at everything I post from now on?

[Grimmas]

Can you write me a check list of things so I make sure what I see lines up with what you see so people can talk about shit on this board again. I have my opinions about wrestling. You have yours. Can we leave it at that?

Did you come on a discussion board to just state your opinions and that's it or did you want to discuss them? This is a discussion board, not your blog.

 

I disagree with people on lots of stuff about wrestling and I engage on them. That's what a board is all about.

[stro]

You're not discussing anything with me. You just keep telling me I'm wrong for thinking X about Y. In every thread. Not great for a discussion, especially from a mod.