Apparently Raw continues to be a ratings king on Monday nights and averages more than 5 million viewers a week. But that doesn’t mean it’s beyond reproach. I was an avid wrestling fan, even after that young age when you figure out it’s fake, or after they basically came out and told everyone that it is rigged. However I continued to watch it due to my love of the wrestlers, which I considered actors at this point, and the athleticism they display week after week. The matches may be rigged, and plenty of hits are fake – but a lot of the things they do would most definitely hurt like hell.
I stopped watching wrestling awhile after Rock turned heel, but before the fall of WCW. After that it took a long time for me to garner any interest in it. My brother finally had me watching once again, nearly ten years later. Much had changed but I readily embraced it once more, remarking how much the business and the wrestlers themselves had changed. Some changed for the better and some for worse. I could never recapture what I felt as a youth, but after watching my first Royal Rumble in about a decade I came pretty close.
It’s now been going on three years since I’ve returned as a wrestling spectator, but I’ve noticed after a year and a half how repetitive and stale the whole thing has become, on Raw in particular. I don’t ever remember the current champion competing on the weekly show, except on rare occasions. There would be maybe one Championship Title match on Raw per year, and that was a big maybe. Now the Champion wrestles pretty much every single week and sometimes against the very person they are scheduled to face in the monthly pay per view! (albeit in a tag team match.)
The whole point behind the Champion never wrestling on the weekly show or against the PPV opponent was simple: The anticipation and excitement was so much better when they just talked smack every week, then the pay per view was the big payoff. Raw has completely destroyed this and the show suffers because of it.
The feuds are another thing that really kill Raw for me. We have to watch the same wrestlers fight one another each week and then again in a pay per view. Sometimes it goes to two pay per views! Just recently Randy Orton fought CM Punk at Wrestlemania, then fought him the following Monday and now a third time at Extreme Rules. For all of the supposed superstars in the stables of both brands of WWE, we see the same ones every week on Raw. Wrestling at this point is storytelling, so why don’t the writers do something creative and write in a decent storyline for the wrestlers they hardly use each week.
I understand the supposed reasoning behind having the champion compete most every week before the pay per view and the use of the same matches every week. It’s just to satisfy the fans in attendance and make their ticket money worth their while by seeing every main superstar in action. I understand but don’t like it. In the meantime I still watch Raw every week and keep complaining every week because nothing changes and we get more of the same over and over and over and over… you get the point.
I just how many fans out there feel the same way I do and watch begrudgingly each week in hopes of something new. What will it take for Raw to become better than what it is? A ratings drop? Fan petitions? I know they won’t be holding this fan’s interest much longer so I hope they do something sooner rather than later. But until then, I’ll still faithfully write a review each week until I can no longer!
Grizzly Bomb 