Work of Wrestling host Tim Kail is joined by resident Bret Hart-expert, Al Monelli, to finally discuss Bret's New York Times Bestselling autobiography Hitman: My Real Life in the Cartoon World of Wrestling.
Read More
This week on The Work of Wrestling podcast I give my review of the Extreme Rules pay-per-view, focusing primarily on the excellent main event championship match between Roman Reigns and AJ Styles.
Read More
This week I'm joined by my friend Brian Ariotti to discuss the intersection between the art of comedy and the art of professional wrestling.
In addition to sharing stories about working at Ringside Collectibles, Brian talks about his top five favorite wrestlers (which includes The Boogie Man), how he feels about maturing into adulthood, and he shares some useful insights on how to avoid becoming jaded and how "life experience" can positively affect the way we consume art.
Read More
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.
Read More
This week’s episode of Monday Night Raw perfectly demonstrates why a three-hour running time is (to put it lightly) too long a running time for Monday Night Raw. No matter how good an episode might be, by the end of the second hour, RAW has used up its energy and most of its goodwill, and the audience becomes noticeably exhausted and increasingly disinterested. It is an impossible length of time to contend with, especially for the “average viewer” the WWE relentlessly pursues. Around 10:00 pm, I felt my attention and my emotional investment wane. I was full, but the WWE insisted on serving me another entree, cramming four or five matches into a forty-minute span, building toward a main event that today’s WWE-viewer simply doesn’t want to watch. And that is a shame, because had the show been two hours it would have certainly been the best episode in months.
Read More
The kind of pro-wrestling I’ve been advocating for on The Work of Wrestling home-site & podcast for the past twelve months already exists.
It can be easily found by taking a trip into the past.
Last night, instead of watching RAW, I perused the WWE Network in search of something historically significant. I watched a few Attitude Era episodes of RAW. I watched a bit of WCW Nitro.
Read More