Monday Night RAW is OK television. It’s spinning its wheels trying to be a family sitcom, a reality series and a STARZ drama. It’s what happens when The Big Bang Theory meets Survivor meets Spartacus; all shows well past their prime, by the way. RAW is missing an identity. An identity that they clearly had during the Attitude Era. They don’t have a single target audience, so they can’t have a vision for meeting their needs, so they can’t produce a show with any semblance of decent writing. It’s just not possible. They’re trying to take all the soon-to-be expired ingredients in the fridge, throw them in a bowl, and call it salad.
I’m not just needlessly bullying WWE. There is a message behind my rambling. Almost every television show overstays its welcome. You can hardly blame them – when you’re making steady money, it’s hard to imagine stepping away and trying something completely different. House is a great example of a show that could have ended two years before it did, and went out as one of the best series ever written. I’m sad that there will never be another episode of Breaking Bad, but it’s one of the only TV series that took its leave before it ruined its legacy. Boardwalk Empire is another I hear is getting ready to do the same thing.
Monday Night RAW, I believe, is the one exception to the rule. That’s because it isn’t a normal TV series – it’s professional wrestling. It will have its ups and downs, but it could still be around in 50 years with enough care and dedication from great writers, creative minds, and intelligent members of senior management. But that doesn’t mean it gets to skip all the other laws that every good TV show must follow. It must have a key demographic. It must have a clear, attainable goal and vision. It must have an identity that allows its fans to have a real, ongoing “EXPERIENCE” – there’s that key word again – that will keep them coming back.
Right now WWE is trying to promote a brand, and not a television show. The “WWE” brand is a higher priority than Monday Night RAW. That is, in a very concise nutshell, why the show isn’t great anymore. Ratings in the Attitude Era were high because of a number of reasons, but if you actually strip away everything, at its core the WWF vision was to bring people to Monday Night RAW at all costs. It wasn’t to sell PPV – that’s putting the cart before the horse; if RAW is good enough, people will buy the PPV.
WCW Nitro kept them on that course. They had to be a great TV show, or they would lose the war. Competition breeds success. Now they have no competition just because there are no legitimate wrestling companies on TV that approach their ratings. But when you try and act like pop culture, and not wrestling, your competition is EVERYONE. Now they spend all their time promoting a brand that’s about to be dropkicked off the stock exchange.
The WWE’s vision now is to promote a brand by slapping their logo on everything possible, and getting people to pay for it. The problem with that is the product behind the brand just isn’t great anymore. They seem to have forgotten that Monday Night RAW is the driving force behind their entire business model. Now the equation is backwards. They’re banking on a PPV not to suck, in hopes the RAW ratings are decent the next night.
I really hope people don’t mistake this for a rant condemning any of the performers in the WWE currently. The roster is actually at a point where it has more potential than I’ve seen in a decade, if you include a dozen names in NXT, and the recent batch of new acquisitions. There’s a talent pool in WWE that could put on the best show you’ve ever seen in your life, if given the opportunity to succeed. But until Monday Night RAW returns to the focus of their business model, I really have no interest in the company’s future, no matter who they sign to a contract.
