The WWE has embarked upon its self-proclaimed "New Era".

The past two months, this idea has taken concrete form in a strict separation between the shows Monday Night Raw & SmackDown Live (separate rosters, brand-specific stories, brand-specific championships, and brand-specific divisions), a renewed focus on the significance of earning a Championship opportunity or victory, showcasing talent that might typically be underutilized, new General Managers in the form of Daniel Bryan for SmackDown & Mick Foley for RAW, and a variety of structural and aesthetic changes to both shows. It is an experiment still in its infancy, and like many experiments it results in some successes and some failures.

THE ART OF BELIEVABILITY IN PROFESSIONAL WRESTLING

Professional wrestling (even the WWE's spectacle-based version dubbed Sports Entertainment) is most effective when it's believable. Believable does not necessarily mean "realistic". As works of fantasy and science-fiction often demonstrate, believability has less to do with real-world characters and real-world situations and more to do with establishing a clear relationship between cause and effect.

One of the clearest examples of this principle in action is when a wrestler pulls their opponent's tights. If a pro-wrestler pulls the tights of another wrestler during a pin, it's understood by the audience that doing so gives that wrestler an unfair amount of leverage on their opponent and almost always guarantees a victory.

THE RAW REVIEW

I only have so many sentences left.

Even if I live a long life, every time I finish writing a sentence, I’m getting closer and closer to the last one I’ll ever write.

Put like that, I can’t help but question why I would ever devote an extensive amount of time writing about a television show I regard as inescapably terrible. Whether or not it’s terrible for anyone else isn’t important to me when considering if I should go on writing a weekly RAW REVIEW. For me, the one who writes this, Monday Night Raw is a terrible television show that exhibits no real sign of genuine improvement and hasn’t in the four years I’ve been writing about it. Genuine improvement would mean a creative overhaul. A creative overhaul means an entirely different creative team with entirely different ideas from the ones currently making it on our television screens. Creative overhaul means never seeing another “invasion” angle or another “collusion” angle or anything anyone could easily identify as an “angle”. Creative overhaul means reconditioning the audience to be an actual audience rather than a cult of greedy, ignorant, self-important blog-babies who think summary-writing qualifies as writing and repeatedly using the word “nuance” is an indicator of intelligence and that the art pro-wrestling is a “choose your own adventure” young adult novel.

The Writings