New Brand Split – Same Old WWE?

Word has come down that we’re getting another WWE brand split. That seems like good news on the face of it. Anything that breaks the tedium to which we’ve been subjected the past 2+ years is welcome. Yet the end of the last brand split also had a lot of promise attached to it, especially with the dawn of the WWE Network shortly afterward, and that went nowhere. I’d like to be excited about this, but most likely the “brand split” is little more than a gimmick. Not since Paul Heyman was booking Smackdown was there any discernible difference between the two programs, and even then the main difference was better execution. Very little the WWE might do will deliver much of a payoff as long as we remain trapped in this Corporate Era under Vince McMahon’s ever diminishing creative vision.

I don’t want to come across as impossible to please here, because I’m not. I’m happy Smackdown will air live. Been waiting for that for a decade. That alone makes the show more of a must watch event. And hopefully they give the show a radically different creative and presentational feel. They almost have to do that in order to sell it as something new and different. A roster split almost goes without saying. We all recognize the roster is loaded with talent. This will allow the company to push more wrestlers rather than make everybody below the company’s anointed star look like a chump. At least it theoretically allows that and we can hope for the best.

Yet we’re not seeing much evidence of a culture shift in the current product. The company continues to ignore its live audiences by pushing Roman Reigns as an indomitable face, when a heel turn would set him up for epic clashes with Seth Rollins (who’s trying to convince fans not to root for him at this moment), Dean Ambrose, John Cena, Cesaro, Sami Zayn and Shinsuke Nakamura (man, do I want to see that). Reigns makes the perfect big bad. His tone deaf booking has made him simultaneously unpopular and revered. He’s not a cowardly heel, like seemingly every other heel the WWE churns off the assembly line. Instead he’s a walking, talking (though hopefully not too much talking) boss fight. The WrestleMania 32 main event with HHH largely fell flat (wasn’t bad, but you also can’t call it good), but if any sort of torch got passed it was that Reigns is now the WWE’s ranking adversary, much the way HHH has been for long stretches of his career. He’s not a good guy. He’s not a bad guy. He’s not even THE guy. He’s the guy you’ve got to beat to become the guy. Unfortunately, the WWE has corporate plans for Reigns which seem to preclude using him for maximum creative effect.

And that directly feeds into why we shouldn’t assume the best when it comes to a brand split. It could be nothing more than a cheap marketing ploy, concocted in hope that the company won’t get hammered the next time it’s looking for a new television contract. NBC/Universal has got to be regretting the current deal. Raw has been the worst show on television since 2014. Feel free to argue Smackdown has been worse, but my counter would be they haven’t been acting like anything on Smackdown matters for so long that it’s hard to claim an aimless show is failing to hit its mark. Yet if they go live with Smackdown and it’s Raw-bad, then we get a double dose of disappointment every week. The viewership trend line for both shows continues to head south. While we should hope the WWE finally recognizes the need to completely overhaul its creative side, these are still the same people who dug themselves into this current hole.

Perhaps Vince actually will step back and let the kids run the two separate shows. Triple H has been a booking maestro over in NXT, particularly in building to and then delivering fantastic major events. It would be great to see what he’d do with a Raw or Smackdown roster loaded with talent. Shane’s track record is as much speculation as documented fact, but maybe he brings in someone like Paul Heyman to be his booker or steals some creative talent from Lucha Underground. Nothing wrong with being an exec who brings in the right people and gives them the freedom to do stellar work. Vince’s inability to do might be his greatest failing.

As tempting as it may be to insist they have to do, or not do, certain things for a new brand split to succeed (for instance keeping a single champ or having two), I think the bigger target should be that a successful brand split will give us two shows that continually surprise us. Unlike with the dawn of the WWE Network, where the only thing that changed was how I watched WWE pay-per-view events, we should feel like we’re watching a different, more engaging, more relevant product. I say this as someone who’s been watching the WWE/WWF/WWWF since the champ was this guy named Bruno. Pretending everything has changed won’t save this tired product. The only thing that will is changing everything in earnest.