WWE TV 11/11 - 11/17 Dark days indeed

[Strummer]

Meltz says Bray v Bryan is the title match at Survivor Series. Original plan was Bray v  Miz but I guess they changed their mind.

Bryan was originally going to to be in the triple threat with AJ and Strong

[Blehschmidt]

14 hours ago, sek69 said:

Also, I get WWE's views on accidental blood plus the potential bad optics of having a woman wrestler all busted up and bleeding on TV, but stopping mid-match to try to patch up a cut A. never seems to work and B. just ruins the show. 

I'm very sorry that Mia Yim got busted open, but this just looked absolutely stupid. The referee's obviously telling Shirai to kill time, Shirai having to ridiculously wrestle the ladder up and then fall down to sell some more. Io was already going over, just let her climb the ladder and end the match.

All this accomplished was making Shirai look like an idiot, and the whole thing look glaringly, slap you in the face fake, just so blood wouldn't get seen on television. For fucks sake, it's a contact sport. I'm sure the sponsors would understand.

They could have still run the stuff with Kai and Ray after the fact.

It's insane that this company is so homogenized that no one was able to call an audible to save that from looking so god damn stupid.

[El-P]

And they are doing a "Wargames" match with that mentality ? Won't be pasteurized at all...

[sek69]

The whole spot leading up to the injury was baffling. Holding a ladder up like that while someone does a springboard kick into it is just begging for something like that to happen. 

I was okay with Io overselling while setting up the ladder, but the lady ref having to stop to presumably tell her that Mia wasn't bleeding to death and was okay to continue is what killed it for me. Obviously there probably was a language barrier, but it looked like the director setting up the next scene to shoot while you're watching the movie. 

[sek69]

1 hour ago, El-P said:

And they are doing a "Wargames" match with that mentality ? Won't be pasteurized at all...

Hate to be "that guy", but if AEW is building to an Elite vs Inner Circle war games match, it's going to make the WWE version look like babies in a playpen by comparison. They're gonna have Crockett style blood and guts, but WWE stops for anything deeper than a paper cut. 

[Log]

WWE Wargames are all about one participant getting to the top of the cage and diving onto all the other participants who have, for some unknown reason, decided to congregate in one area and hold onto each other while they stare at the person jumping on them.

[Coffey]

57 minutes ago, Log said:

WWE Wargames are all about one participant getting to the top of the cage and diving onto all the other participants who have, for some unknown reason, decided to congregate in one area and hold onto each other while they stare at the person jumping on them.

And Mauro yells "Mama Mia!", the crowd chants "This is awesome!" or "Holy shit!" over & over... and outside of being used in future video packages, it's completely ignored & forgotten within a week.

[jiraffejustin]

Don't forget that spot where four people hold up three people who hold up two people who hold up one person and then everybody falls down. 

[NintendoLogic]

Looks like somebody lent Brock their Arcade Fire albums.

[gordi]

In Suplex City, I, I never learned to pile-drive
And you told me we'd never have teams of five strive to survive
Grab your giant cell phone, Paul, we're leaving
You always seemed so sure
That one day we'd be fighting in a war games
Your brand against mine
I saw you standing on the opposite ring apron
But by the time the first powerbombs were thrown
We were already bored
We were already, already bored

 

In my dreams the WrestleMania 33 crowd is still booing
They're still booing
They're still booing

[MoS]

From the Observer:

Quote

Raw on 11/11 did a 1.7 rating and 2,056,000 viewers (1.36 viewers per home) making it the least-watched non-holiday episode of Raw in modern history.

The only episodes that drew less viewers were Christmas Eve this past year doing 1,775,000 and New Year’s Eve doing 1,985,000. But there were two other records set, for the biggest first-to-third hour drop and for the worst third hour ever.

As bad as that sounds, and it’s certainly not good, one aspect wasn’t bad. Given the competition, the worst possible, a San Francisco 49ers vs. Seattle Seahawks game with two of the top teams, going into overtime, and drawing 15,978,000 viewers, beating the two number of the season by two million, a taped show doing 78,000 fewer viewers and a 3.7 percent drop isn’t that bad.

What was bad is the 25.7 percent first-to-third hour drop was the largest of all-time, breaking the record of a 24.5 percent drop on 1/21. Because of that drop, the third hour did 1,753,000 viewers, actually less than the third hour on Christmas Eve (1,784,000) and third hour on New Year’s Eve (1,843,000). Overall, it beat only the first hour on Christmas Eve (that did 1,752,000 viewers, just 1,000 lower) for the lowest hour for Raw since cable hit 60 million homes in the mid-90s. While if they had a great match in the main event spot it wouldn’t have been as bad, most of that drop was due to the game.

WWE has a huge problem with retaining its audience. The 3rd hour has never been great for viewership numbers, but even relatively, they are doing worse than they used to do. An argument can be made that fans actually want WWE to succeed and give them a chance every week, but then get burned off by some segment and do not switch back. 

[El-P]

New boom period.

Seth Rollins = asses in the seats.

[FMKK]

5 hours ago, MoS said:

From the Observer:

WWE has a huge problem with retaining its audience. The 3rd hour has never been great for viewership numbers, but even relatively, they are doing worse than they used to do. An argument can be made that fans actually want WWE to succeed and give them a chance every week, but then get burned off by some segment and do not switch back. 

Those three hour shows are made to be recorded and fast forwarded through, even if the content was good. Even by the end of a good two hour weekly show like AEW I'm ready for the show to end by the time the last segment is finishing up.

[MoS]

1 hour ago, FMKK said:

Those three hour shows are made to be recorded and fast forwarded through, even if the content was good. Even by the end of a good two hour weekly show like AEW I'm ready for the show to end by the time the last segment is finishing up.

True, but in the last couple of months, they have seen many huge first to third hour declines, far worse than the general decline used to be. 

[Rocco]

Almost like a 3 hour live TV show every week is a terrible idea but my guess is they make way too much money for that 3rd hour to give it up.  

[C.S.]

On 11/11/2019 at 9:58 PM, KawadaSmile said:

Holy shit @C.S. are you still defending Lana's acting skills?

Finally watched this... As you can imagine, it wasn't exactly a priority.

I won't defend the storyline or absolutely dreadful scripting, but I will defend Lana's delivery. It was hilarious, over-the-top, and a hoot to watch her work. This is bad, she knows it's bad, and she does an absolutely perfect job with it. Her emphasis on the most unnatural and hamfisted parts of this - "sex" and "Bobby Lashley" (because everyone refers to their lover by their full name) - was amazing. Lana knows she's in a storyline that makes even the worst soap opera look like "Casablanca," and she has enough acting chops to know exactly how this WrestleCrap material should be handled. 

[Slasher]

3 hours ago, C.S. said:

Finally watched this... As you can imagine, it wasn't exactly a priority.

I won't defend the storyline or absolutely dreadful scripting, but I will defend Lana's delivery. It was hilarious, over-the-top, and a hoot to watch her work. This is bad, she knows it's bad, and she does an absolutely perfect job with it. Her emphasis on the most unnatural and hamfisted parts of this - "sex" and "Bobby Lashley" (because everyone refers to their lover by their full name) - was amazing. Lana knows she's in a storyline that makes even the worst soap opera look like "Casablanca," and she has enough acting chops to know exactly how this WrestleCrap material should be handled. 

To be honest, I doubt Heyman or whoever is booking that storyline was going for Wrestlecrap. In that sense, that means she is actually undermining the gravity of the storyline. That is not what a good actor does. A good actor acts in good faith, regardless of if she recognizes that it is a Wrestlecrap storyline.

 

[El-P]

Have you seen the "I'm salty" video ? She's just a rotten actress. Not that even a great one could make this awful angle and script bearable, but she's not bad on purpose. She's just bad at acting. She was really good at cutting wrestling promos with a fake russian accent.

[sek69]

I'm surprised more people don't go the "HBK vs Hogan" route and go all out over the top with these terrible angles and gimmicks. The Revival did it when the Usos did that bit where they put Icy Hot in their gear and it at least made  something terrible a little more memorable.

[Coffey]

5 hours ago, Rocco said:

Almost like a 3 hour live TV show every week is a terrible idea...  

I also don't think enough people ever talk about how RAW is on from 8pm to 11pm on a work night & people just have lives & shit to do. I know that WWE has always pretty much went to that hour in the night & other shows have had success on nights where people have to get up early in the morning. The thing is though, to me, if you're watching RAW & the shit sucks, it's a lot easier to be like "eh, whatever" & just crash out early. Especially if you have to get up at like 6am. That extra hour of sleep is more valuable than a mediocre additional hour of WWE, y'know?

Like, in this current world we live in, outside of people that are marathoning & season of a show on something like Netflix, who is still dedicating a three hour block of their time to a show? Let alone every week. It's just too much of a time commitment. And unlike if you're watching a streaming service, it's all in one live block. I can't imagine too many people are interesting & sitting down to watch the show while it airs live. Sitting through all the of commercials. Imagine if people didn't have DVR.

Yes, I used to do that for WCW Nitro. But that was fucking half my life ago & I was in high school without shit to do other than go to school. 17-18 year olds don't give a shit about WWE like I did back then. They're watching shit on YouTube, Twitch or one of the dozen paid streaming services.

[C.S.]

47 minutes ago, Slasher said:

To be honest, I doubt Heyman or whoever is booking that storyline was going for Wrestlecrap. In that sense, that means she is actually undermining the gravity of the storyline. That is not what a good actor does. A good actor acts in good faith, regardless of if she recognizes that it is a Wrestlecrap storyline.

Please...

There is no gravity here. There is nothing even remotely resembling quality. 

Heyman has to know that. If he doesn't, ECW died at the right time and he should be Bischoffed out of a WWE position immediately.

Lana clearly knows it though, and she's doing the absolute best job she can possibly do with a script and storyline so hamfisted and illiterate that there is literally no other way to approach the material. 

[sek69]

Just posting to mention I support Eric Bischoff being turned into a verb.

[El-P]

And so, Scarlett Bordeaux first appearance on NXT is some random backstage segment. Nice. Anyways. I wonder how they are gonna fuck that one up. She's got everything WWE should love : super hot blonde, she can work, she can be funny. I wish she would have ended up in AEW instead but hey... IMPACT did fuck that up big time, and I would guess Kross is next. I will probably check it out whenever she does her real debut though.

[Strummer]

Rollins v Andrade announced for Raw with Rollins's captainship for team Raw on the line

[jiraffejustin]

Have they ever done a good job explaining why Raw would want to compete with Smackdown? I get that it's sort of like the Pro Bowl, but the players really don't give a shit about that game.