Wrestling’s 4Rs: The Right, Wrong and Ridiculous of WWE Raw

How the 4Rs of wRestling Work!
Here is a quick explanation of the 4R’s. The column will run TWO times a week. We will group our feelings on the shows in various categories: The Right, the wRong and the Ridiculous. The Right is stuff that worked very well: a great promo, a great match and so on. PuRgatoRy is a section between the right and wrong. It shows equal traits from both sides that cannot be ignored and needs discussed. It is not a bad place per say, as things can get remedied or go the wrong way the very next week. The wRong is what it sounds like: bad matches, bad or boring promos and so on. The Ridiculous is stuff that had no right on TV: Stupid angles and so on. And there is always a possibility of a 5th R, which is as bad as they come. This column is supposed to be analytical, and at the right time very critical of the shows, it was the whole reason it was created. This is not a “mark” column, nor a “smark” column, our goal is to analyze the show from many different fronts, reward the good and call out the bad. We will not apologize for our opinions, they are as they are, whether positive or negative.

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By: Jack Stevenson

Raw 6.08.15:
QUICK MATCH RESULTS:
* Kevin Owens d. Neville to retain the NXT Championship
* Nikki Bella d. Summer Rae
* Sheamus d. Randy Orton via disqualification
* Kane d. Dolph Ziggler
* Luke Harper & Erick Rowan d. Los Matadores
* Big. E d. Titus O’Neil
* Roman Reigns d. Kofi Kingston
* J & J Security d. Seth Rollins

THE Right:
Kevin Owens vs. Neville: This was a pretty rocking match. Everything Neville did looked fluid and crisp, and Owens knew exactly when to derail his highflying antics with some wrecking ball style moves. It was a punchy little TV match and it’s impressive on a couple of different levels how easily these guys exist within the confines of a Raw format having spent most of their careers on the independent scene, where the demands are very different. Owens won fairly emphatically and interestingly had it much easier against Neville than John Cena did, I don’t know whether that reflects big plans for Kevin or crumbling ones for the Man That Gravity Forgot. Regardless, this was a satisfying TV match.

J&J Security Snap!: It wasn’t a good night for Seth Rollins, but his slow burn humiliation at least made for hugely entertaining viewing. He and the Authority weren’t in their usual position in the ring at the beginning of the show to do a fifteen minute promo with some arguing and match making, so the first we saw of them was in a short backstage segment, where after his brief display of disquiet last week Seth was shamelessly sucking up to Triple H and Stephanie. It was a super neat character touch for it to be underlined that Rollins didn’t get in HHH’s face last week out of any kind of genuine bravery, but just because he was in the midst of a temper tantrum. Anyway, the Authority passive aggressively gave Rollins the chance to prove himself by competing in a match of his choice in the main event. At this point the champ should have probably picked King Barrett for a guaranteed victory, but instead he got into a falling out with J&J Security, which was actually made for quite sad viewing as it dawned on you just how loyal and subservient Noble and Mercury had been to their master and that they were getting no gratitude in return. Conversely, Noble’s deadpan insistence that the three of them were essentially “The Shield 2.0” and that Joey Mercury is an “upgraded Roman Reigns” was genuinely hilarious, and Mercury finally talking and standing up for himself was a nice moment. This all led to Seth squaring off with his security team in a watchable main event, although the WWE Champion probably shouldn’t have lost to a pair of part time goons, even in a handicap match, even off a distraction finish. Rollins could have won the match fairly comfortably but then taken a bit of a beating post match from J&J with the help of Ambrose and Reigns, we’d have still got our cathartic moment. Still, there was a fair amount to enjoy in the bout, from Noble’s cocky stutter step as he picked up momentum against his former boss to Dean Ambrose, watching on from the front row, casually sprinking popcorn into Rollins’ hair. A nice show long storyline which provided nearly everything worthwhile that happened on this week’s broadcast.

puRgatoRy:
Kevin Owens and John Cena will be fighting at Money in the Bank: Kevin Owens and John Cena opened the show arguing in the ring, and since they were finished in around ten minutes and the Authority didn’t appear even once, it was one of the more refreshing openings to an episode in a while. Still, the whole concept of the show opening promo is terribly stale at this point, especially considering it featured the same familiar tropes with different guys performing them- a guy cut a promo and then another guy came out and cut a promo, a match was made, and there was little drive and ambition to proceedings. Anyway, in the end Owens and Cena were left squabbling over who could offer the more desirable open challenge for their championship, and then Neville came out to say that personally, he’d rather face the NXT Champion because of his despicable actions while holding a belt that Neville himself was so proud to defend, and then Owens and Neville had a match which was pretty good as I have already detailed.

All the Money in the Bank guys are fighting each other: One thing this episode of Raw had going for it were three big, separate plot points that all received a decent amount of time to breathe- Cena vs. Owens, Rollins’ quest for respect, and the final build to the Money in the Bank Ladder match. Sadly, the latter storyline was enacted in the most clichéd way possible, with all of the competitors being paired off in singles matches after an in ring promo in which they all came out one after the other to essentially just say “hey, I’m in Money in the Bank as well!” It’s doubly frustrating that WWE did this because that very same promo also featured the funniest and most self-referential thing they’ve done in fucking ages. R-Truth danced out on stage to cut a promo about how he was going to definitely win Money in the Bank this Sunday, only for Kane to forcefully point out that… he wasn’t in the match. Truth was surprised but accepted this turn of events gracefully, and disappeared as quickly as he’d arrived. I mean, it doesn’t sound funny because I’m not describing it very well, but in reality It was a dead on parody of how routine and monotonous these kind of “everyone in a multi-man match in the ring arguing” promos are, to the extent that having been in so many of them before, Truth would just automatically assume that he should come out and say some words as well. The creative team, it appears, are actually aware of how worn out and processional these segments are, and yet they still book them all the darn time! Gah! So, a boring segment with one really great jewel of a moment in it.

Roman Reigns vs. Kofi Kingston: This was a pretty decent in which both men worked extremely hard, but it was difficult to really hook into it because Kingston’s been presented as so far below Reigns level for so long. There were nice sequences and good near falls but it just felt so random that these two would be having a competitive singles match all of a sudden. Still, I’d rather have this fresh if flawed pairing than, say, another Randy Orton-Sheamus match, which was so uninteresting I have literally nothing to say about it. Xavier Woods howled his support for his New Day pals throughout this and the preceding Big E/Titus O’Neil match, and coined a new nickname for TAFKA Langston, the “Minister of Mass.” Even after bellowing it in his face five times Michael Cole was still like “it’s the minister of mash he loves mashed potatoes I guess.” This is appropriate I suppose because mashing a potato is just the worst and least tasty thing you can do to it and thus it’s exactly the sort of thing the New Day would love. By this point in the card the show had completely ran out of steam so it made little difference, but I liked the final three matches all flowing into each other with barely an interruption, anything that disrupts the usual flow of Raw is good in my eyes.

THE wRong:
Divas’ Division Idiocy: Paige and Nikki Bella were seriously not getting along this week and I think this means that, Jesus Christ, The Bellas are heel again. Literally four weeks ago it was “OK, the Bellas are nice people now for no apparent reason.” And all of a sudden its “oh, now the Bellas are acting all mean again for no apparent reason.” Whoever is booking this wretched Divas division seriously needs to get a clue, they either need to learn the importance of stable fan favorite/rule breaker alignments or understand how to make people seem likeable or preferably both of these things. On the plus side, I did like the “maybe this is Paige’s house, but she’s living in the Bellas’ world” line from Nikki’s promo. That was quite good.

Lana plunges off the stage: Dolph Ziggler and Kane had a match but it was really a backdrop for one of the more annoying moments of the Rusev/Lana feud, in which the Bulgarian Brute harassed his former gal pal on the entrance ramp until she slipped off the stage and landed badly on her ankle. When I hear “off the stage” I think of, like, people flying off it through nine tables and a bunch of explosive electrical equipment, but Lana just stumbled off the shallow end and then whimpered for seventeen hours while Ziggler tried to pretend he has some kind of emotional depth and isn’t just a smug stunted frat boy whose main concern in life is whether people are laughing at his shit jokes.

MizTV with Ryback & The Big Show: As a thing that actually happened, “MizTV with Ryback and The Big Show” is a damning indictment of the state of WWE in 2015. I like all three of these guys in the right environment but it felt like Miz was the only one of them who had any energy in this segment and he couldn’t carry the whole thing of his own. Ryback and Show seemed to have accepted that this was just a bit of filler that no one would care about, and the prophecy was self-fulfilling. Ryback vs. Big Show for the Intercontinental Championship at Money in the Bank in a match that nobody asked for.

THE Ridiculous:
NOTHING

The 411:
Just another episode of Raw. I liked bits and pieces of it- Kevin Owens vs. Neville was a really good opening match and the Seth Rollins/J&J Security split was well delivered, even if it did rather come out of nowhere. Many of the segments were just boring though, boring to the point of stifling. I don’t care about whatever’s going on in the Divas Division and I don’t care about Ryback/Big Show and I don’t care about Lana’s ankle and I don’t care about whether Roman Reigns can topple the mighty challenge of Kofi Kingston or who out of Dolph Ziggler or Kane is slightly less of a geek or even about the Money in the Bank Ladder match beyond the possibility that Roman Reigns somehow loses or that a new, effective way of falling off a ladder is invented. Aside from WrestleMania 31, some isolated PPV matches and about two and a half episodes of Raw, WWE has been really bad all year long, and it doesn’t even have the decency to be bad in an interesting or original way. I think sometimes the format of the Rs, or at least the way I write them, doesn’t accurately convey how generally bad WWE is, because there’s a lot of segments that I can justifiably put in purgatory because they’re not doing much actively wrong in and of themselves, or have some good individual performances by talented wrestlers in them that I don’t want to ignore, but the overall direction of the product is just so stale.

Show Rating: 4.5

As a reminder, I will be going by the 411 scale…

0 – 0.9: Torture
1 – 1.9: Extremely Horrendous
2 – 2.9: Very Bad
3 – 3.9: Bad
4 – 4.9: Poor
5 – 5.9: Not So Good
6 – 6.9: Average
7 – 7.9: Good
8 – 8.9:Very Good
9 – 9.9: Amazing
10: Virtually Perfect

10: Virtually Perfect

The 997th edition is over…