How WWE Hurts Its Own Product

Yes, we all know WWE is scripted, but that doesn’t mean they have to remind everyone of that every week.

At the WWE Elimination Chamber PPV a few weeks ago, Naomi achieved a major career milestone by winning the SmackDown Women’s Championship for the first time. Shortly after the PPV ended, Naomi posted a video of herself celebrating this achievement with her real-life husband Jimmy Uso.

This video was then shared by WWE’s official YouTube page and promoted by the company itself. While this was a genuine feel-good moment, there was one problem with this moment’s execution: Naomi is a babyface and Jimmy Uso is a clear-cut heel.

For WWE to promote this video and showcase a moment of joy shared between two characters of opposite allegiance is a major reason WWE’s own product isn’t drawing in new viewers very easily. In this situation, WWE doesn’t even care about its own universe’s rules and existing storylines.

They don’t care that Jimmy Uso, who is supposed to be a heel, is supposed to be booed every time he’s seen by the audience. And who is going to boo a loving husband celebrating his wife’s biggest career achievement? No one.

Of course, this isn’t the only case of WWE breaking its own rules with reckless abandon. Almost every time WWE shows one of those charity videos or ‘feel-good’ videos, Stephanie McMahon is shown to be a caring and loving person. This is despite the fact that she plays the most hated character on RAW, the evil arch-villainess that demoralizes her own employees.

While it’s true that most fans know that the wrestlers seen on TV are portraying characters, that does not mean that we should be constantly reminded of that fact. WWE shouldn’t keep telling fans that everything they see isn’t real and the storylines are only between fictional characters on a scripted wrestling show.

Not only does that insult the fans’ intelligence by suggesting they can’t differentiate between real and scripted, but it also makes it difficult for anyone to become invested in WWE’s storylines. The entire point of wrestling storylines is for viewers to suspend their disbelief and believe that something that isn’t real actually could be real.

When there’s a contradiction in WWE’s own rules, as with the aforementioned video of Naomi and Jimmy Uso, it sends another message to the fans as well. Any fan who might be thinking, ‘hey wait a minute. He’s a bad guy’, would be met with the message, ‘ah that doesn’t matter, here’s a loving married couple celebrating a huge win’.

After seeing that video and reaching this latter conclusion, why would these fans care about anything else in WWE? If WWE itself shows apathy towards its own storylines and characters, why should the fans do anything different?

It has been said that there are many reasons why WWE’s ratings are down right now. This is true: ratings are down for many reasons, ranging from an increase in streaming services and DVRs for the product, to oversaturation of the product.

But one factor that appears to be becoming more prevalent is the laziness and lack of strictness in the show’s writing. WWE doesn’t have a clear-cut set of rules when it comes to progressing its storylines, so mentalities and logic are constantly changing.