WWE: Here’s The Blueprint For Bringing Bayley Back To Prominence

Bayley should have been one of the biggest babyfaces on the WWE Raw brand, but, instead, a botched feud with Alexa Bliss has left her off of prominent storylines for months. But fear not, there’s a way for Bayley to rise back to the top of the women’s division.

It didn’t happen overnight, but Bayley became one of NXT’s biggest success stories, forming a feud with Sasha Banks that will be spoken about highly for years to come. Bayley and Banks put together two of the greatest women’s matches of all-time, including an “Iron Woman” bout that featured innovative spots and callbacks to their first big fight.

Bayley’s rise from being a lovable loser to a major success story seemed to give the WWE a license to print money. Not only did kids look up to the resilient, upbeat, respectful, and talented “Huggable One”, but her story of perseverance resonated with the adults. There was a subtle nuance to her character in NXT, and this nuance was quickly lost on the main roster.

A lack of nuanced character work is often a product of the creative team’s decision-making, which generally fails to account for the long-term view, which causes the writing staff to callously neglect the integrity and development of the show’s characters.

I’ll let the Big Show explain a part of the problem:

"“Years ago they were worried about four months from now, now they’re worried about TV every day and trying to be like this needs to be done today and two weeks later they forget about what they did which makes it tough now — it’s hard.”"

This applies to Bayley, because instead of extending her character from NXT, the creative team decided to do their own thing with her. When Bayley was first called up to the main roster, she had absolutely nothing to do. I get that the WWE was focused on the excellent feud between Sasha Banks and Charlotte Flair, but you’d think they’d have some sort of plan for another one of their incredibly talented wrestlers.

Instead, Bayley toiled away. She was lucky if she had a match, though the WWE was intent on trotting out a “green” Dana Brooke as her regular opponent on pay per view. What good did that do for anybody?

The WWE failed to build any sort of a foundation for Bayley, who needed to receive more comprehensive booking in order to establish the subtleties of the character she cultivated in NXT. To main roster-only fans, Bayley seemed like a cookie-cutter, goody two-shoes babyfaces, but she was so much more than that to fans who saw her scratch and claw in NXT. She had an extra edge to her, and, yes, she could appropriately display more complicated emotions to the crowd.

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Unfortunately, the WWE didn’t care “about four months from now”, as Big Show said. Because when Bayley was sent into the Raw Women’s Championship picture in a feud with Charlotte, she was a flat character.

Worse yet, she was a flat character who was given even flatter promos. It still boggles my mind how moronic the troglodytes on the creative team must be.

They literally had Bayley recite a god-awful poem to Charlotte at one point. Every week, she would come out and go on and on about how she always dreamed of being a superstar.

Like, yeah, we get it. Don’t just tell us. Show us. The WWE didn’t have to re-create the story in NXT, but they could have at least given us a better “chase” story with segments that actually tear out our hear-strings. Instead, we got repetitive, overly-scripted promos from Bayley that didn’t feel genuine, and Charlotte spitting out robotic bully promos that seemed more farcical than menacing.

Yet, Bayley’s Raw Women’s Championship win was a big deal. She took the title from Charlotte on an episode of Raw (because, you know, Charlotte couldn’t lose on pay per view), and the reaction she received was tremendous. Despite the fact that the WWE gave her nothing for months and saddled her with lazily-written dialogue, people still cared. And that’s a testament to the cred Bayley built up in NXT and her ability to be taken seriously in that ring.

The real problems began after that. Bayley needed help from Sasha Banks to defend her title at Fastlane to break Charlotte’s PPV streak. She came off like the opposite of her character, particularly in the Raw Talk segment afterwards. Bayley would retain the title at WrestleMania without any help in a multi-woman match, but the fact that the WWE didn’t want Bayley to beat Charlotte one-on-one cleanly on PPV was a huge mistake. It also foreshadowed what would transpire months later.

Now we get to the Bayley/Alexa Bliss feud. They both put on a quality match at Payback that led to Bliss winning the title, which made sense in a way.

Bliss was on fire on the mic after joining Raw during the “Superstar Shakeup”, and Bayley is better at chasing anyway.

The problem is that the WWE buried her on an awful “This Is Your Life” segment and never gave her the chance at comeuppance at Extreme Rules. As opposed to telling a story in which the heel (Bliss) admonished Bayley for being too sweet and Bayley showed that extra edge at Extreme Rules by beating Bliss up, the WWE just had Bayley lose in the most embarrassing way possible.

Following an awkward promo with Corey Graves in which Bayley came off more like a little kid than the grown-up, bad-ass woman that she is, I find it baffling that Vince McMahon was upset with the Toronto crowd for booing Bayley.

The only person Vince should have been upset with was himself, because he completely misread the crowd and dropped the ball on one of his favorites (notice how he tends to do this a lot with sure things, with Roman Reigns as the other example).

On the bright side, it actually won’t be difficult to make Bayley one of the WWE’s top stars again. She’s still well-liked by most fans, and the only hitch is the WWE’s ability to book her as a credible challenger or champion. Fans already know how good she is, and they already want to root for her. The boos? Those were for Vince himself, and Toronto has been known to make their feelings towards the Chairman crystal clear.

So turning Bayley heel isn’t a viable option. Maybe it could work, but it’s too risky. Beyond that, Bayley is one of the few people on the roster who can be a convincing babyface, and, again, she still has hardcore fans across all demographics. There’s no need to turn her heel, because turning someone heel for the sake of turning them heel is a recipe for disaster. Remember what happened to Dolph Ziggler when he turned on Kalisto?

It’s all about the booking. Sure, you can book Bayley to cheat with Sasha, and you can book her to be afraid on a kendo stick. But if you want her to be a credible babyface and one of the biggest stars in the company, you won’t do something that mind-numbingly stupid.

So far, the WWE has taken the right first step; they’ve largely kept Bayley away from the spotlight so fans can let the stink of that Bliss feud fade. But now, it’s time to start integrating her back into storylines, because there’s a difference between waiting and delaying.

What does Bayley do when she comes back? She shows some fire and intensity. The Raw Women’s Division is under attack by Absolution, and perhaps Bayley could take the fight to them. The WWE knows that the need to give Bayley more of a “babyface edge”, and that’s a way to do it without having her lose any of the genuine virtue that her character exhibits.

If that’s too soon, the WWE could just wait until another “Superstar Shakeup” and move her to SmackDown Live. This is not a new suggestion, because many others would like to see her move to the “Blue Brand” where the booking is more character-centric and the promos are burdened less by scripting.

I outlined a timeline of Bayley’s booking on Raw so far, because you can clearly see the mistakes. Putting her in random matches, not having her overcome the odds on her own, making her afraid of a fight, and giving her dry promos got her into this mess. The WWE creative team needs to be, well, more creative with what they give Bayley, because she’s the type of character who can go stale if the booking isn’t cautious.

Furthermore, she knows how to play the character perfectly, so the WWE needs to trust her and allow her to more freely express herself in promos. She can inject the right amount of passion, silliness, or whatever emotion the situation requires, and she doesn’t need middle-aged men completely drowning out her voice by handing her stifling promos.

For those of us who watched Bayley closely in NXT and saw moments of brilliances during her time on the main roster, we know just how great she can be. Bayley was legitimately one of the best wrestlers and characters in the women’s division during the time NXT, and she remains a machine in between the ropes.

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With Bayley, the issue isn’t wins and losses or a lack of good matches; the issue is that her booking strayed away from what worked and what fit the character that she used to get over. Get back to those basics, and she’ll be fine. The WWE already took the step of hitting the “pause” button, but a “reset” button isn’t necessary. Just hit “rewind”, but let Bayley take the lead on her character, give her a legit (pun possibly purposeful) storyline, and watch her blossom again.