McGuire’s Monday: WWE Smackdown, AEW Collision, and the fear of getting complacent

By Colin McGuire, ProWrestling.net Staffer

Here’s the thing about writing live television reviews: You’re writing live television reviews.

Week after week. Episode after episode. You’re there. You’re watching. You not only pay attention to the flow of things; you fully digest the flow of things. It’s different if you’re covering a normal television series on a normal network like a normal person. Pro wrestling, though? Pro wrestling is different. There is no season, no reset, no clump of time that allows your brain to get off the treadmill. It’s the same thing. Same commercial breaks. Same format. Week. After week. After week. After week.

I say this, why? Because WWE’s Smackdown is not a good television show these days. I have concluded as much because I am tasked with live reviewing it every week for a different website. Things got awfully exciting for a few months, when The Rock came around. Shoot. Things were even really pretty good when Roman Reigns had a semi-regular presence on the program. These days? Roman is gone. Cody Rhodes finished his story. And the powers that be still can’t quite figure out what to do with either Austin Theory or Grayson Waller.

It’s a shame because the blue brand really had something good going for it. Despite reviewing the show for more than a year now, it only recently began to feel stale. That includes having a grasp of when the commercials were coming, accepting the fact that 80 percent of the opening segments would be some type of promo and almost all the entrances for the final match would happen before a commercial break, stunting the beginning of the main event. Smackdown still felt Big Time. These days, not so much.

As such, this past week, I did something I almost never do anymore: I turned around on the night following Smackdown and watched more pro wrestling. Rarely do I watch AEW’s Collision live, but by the grace of God (and a few Real Life duties), there I was on Saturday, perched on my couch, turning on TNT about 10 minutes after the eight o’clock hour. Why? Because A) I’m still convinced we’re going to be getting a Dark Side of the Ring on the creation of Collision in about 20 years, and B) I wanted to see what this residency in Texas was all about.

The result? It looked good. AEW would do itself some favors if it decided to run more venues like this place they’re going to be camped out in for the next few weeks. The predictable observations came through – a smaller but fuller room is always better than a bigger emptier room; the crowd was fired up, which only elevated the proceedings, etc. – but perhaps the biggest thing for me was that the entranceway was different, the set design felt fresh and the show didn’t feel like “Not Dynamite” for the first time in a while. It was a step forward for a lot of reasons.

But not all the reasons. How so? As Jason Powell noted in his live review of both Collision and the subsequent Battle of the Belts that followed this week’s show, the match outcomes were predictable. As in, very predictable. As in, why are we even doing this-predictable? And no, I’m not going to jump into the tired storytelling debate that all pro wrestling fans use to make themselves feel smart about pro wrestling these days; instead, I’m here to focus on only that – predictability.

To be fair, Smackdown suffers from the same thing, too. LA Knight wrestled Santos Escobar on this week’s episode. One of those two guys will be wrestling at SummerSlam this weekend. That guy wasn’t going to lose a week before the big show. Conversely, Hologram went one-on-one with The Beast Mortos on Collision. One of those guys got a fancy two-week run of promotional packages before he debuted. That guy wasn’t losing his second match on national television.

It got me thinking: Are we on the other side of the crest when it comes to the apex pro wrestling has been experiencing over the last few years? So much has been made of record-breaking gates, television rights deals, lucrative PPVs or PLEs, sold-out arenas, the evolution of a “challenger brand” (my God, I hate that phrase), and so on and so forth; should the pro wrestling industry be cognizant that perhaps the honeymoon is winding down?

Here’s the thing. AEW has tremendous wrestlers who more often than not wrestle tremendous matches, especially when they are asked to step onto the big stages. WWE creative has taken a decidedly better turn since Old Man McMahon was forced out and Mr. Helmsley took over. TNA has some pretty good stuff going on if you can get past the dumbass name. Hell, Bloodsport was last night and that was a lot of fun, too.

My point is that the landscape has established itself as the landscape and I don’t think it’s unfair to now worry that the industry as a whole might sink back into being … well … boring. Companies might rest on their laurels. Creative minds might get bland. There’s so much wrestling available these days, it’s awfully easy to take a rinse/repeat approach. Think of the AEW tree alone. Friday night, they had a five-hour ROH PPV and followed that up Saturday with a three-hour AEW block. It’s hard enough to make sure wrestling stays interesting or unpredictable as it is; working at a clip like that staff did this weekend makes that hope for freshness all but impossible.

Does this mean these companies should book random title changes for the sake of keeping fans guessing? No. But it does mean that maybe The Powers That Be should be more aware of the temptation to be lazy. When the business is as hot as it’s been, it’s easy to take a week off here and a week off there. Once those weeks begin to add up, a creative hole that once felt like a crack in the surface becomes the size of a swimming pool. Then, before you know it, you find yourself in mid-Aughts WWE Land, and nobody wants that. Not only is it bad for a singular company, but it’s bad for the genre. There are already signs that things might be cooling off as it is anyways; there’s no need to shoot yourself in the foot by throwing together television shows that simply aren’t that compelling.

And so I plead with you, pro wrestling television creators: Keep your head up. Don’t let your mind wander too far. Stay focused on keeping the train moving. Because while it might be easier to get Orange Cassidy a win over Johnny TV or to book a tag team match that involves a champion and her upcoming challenger, it also ensures that you’ll run the risk of turning fans away. If your brain turns off, the brains of the fans turn off as well. Keep it sharp. Be engaged. Don’t take the easy way out and don’t contribute to yet another ebb in pro wrestling history.

If nothing else, all of us live-reviewers thank you in advance.