WWE: Vince McMahon Return Another Sign the Company Doesn’t Get It

Vince McMahon will be back on Raw this week, but it’s really just a sign that WWE officials don’t fully understand what the problems plaguing the company lately really are.

For months now, one of the big stories regarding WWE is the ever-falling television ratings. Here’s a story from Forbes discussing how Raw set a record low rating for a second consecutive week. Oh, did I mention that’s from October of this year? And this past week, Raw once again hit a record low rating for the second consecutive show. Not a good sign.

Tuesday nights haven’t been much better than Mondays. SmackDown Live has been suffering from low ratings as well, though not as dire as those affecting Raw. To further complicate matters for WWE, former writers Jimmy Jacobs and Tom Casiello took to Twitter to discuss just how difficult it is to write the weekly WWE shows. Throw in Seth Rollins openly saying Raw sucks — storyline or not — and it’s been a rough go lately for all involved.

So how is the company responding to the very valid criticism of their programming and epically low ratings? By announcing a Vince McMahon comeback!

Yes, rather than book the weekly shows differently, or shake up the writing teams, or anything that might make a difference, Mr. McMahon is coming back to, in WWE’s words, “shake things up.” If we think about that for more than a second or two, it seems that Vince is going to either announce or preside over an early Superstar Shake-Up in the wake of TLC.

If that’s the big solution to all the issues surrounding viewership, it’s safe to say that Vince, or WWE, or whoever don’t fully understand just what the issues are. Is moving, say, Finn Bálor to SmackDown Live in exchange for Rusev going to make a big difference? Of course not.

Even worse, WWE may be under the impression that a Vince McMahon appearance is enough to bump the ratings. Sorry, but again I have to go with a hard “no” here. Right now, Vince is the target of many fans’ ire — after all, he calls the shots, and he’s rumored to have rewritten the last few (awful) weeks of Raw at the last minute. I would hope he’d be greeted accordingly with a resounding boo by the live crowd on Monday, but I’m not holding my breath, either.

WWE’s issues are deeper than you might think at first glance.

No, the problems aren’t with the talent on either show, nor is Vince a guaranteed fix. These issues are a systemic, deeply-ingrained culture. WWE has, for the past 36 years, and for better or for worse, been McMahon’s baby. Once he took over from his father, Vince has been the lead creative voice for the company.

There’s been numerous successes over the year: the Rock and Wrestling boom of the 1980s, the Attitude Era in the late 1990s. But in between those, there have been several down periods in the business that have put a spotlight on McMahon’s inability to read the room. Remember “The New Generation” in the early to mid 1990s? It was a case of Vince trying to do the same thing as the 1980s, but with a different roster of wrestlers. It didn’t fit.

Since the end of the Attitude Era and the death of WCW, it’s been much of the same: WWE trying to rehash the same old stories with a different cast of characters. Hey, it worked in the 1980s, or the late 1990s, why wouldn’t it work now?

Well, because the pop culture landscape is wildly different now than it was then. Vince is set in the old way of business, while today’s audiences want something different.

Within the WWE umbrella, just look at NXT, or 205 Live. From a quality standpoint, both brands are seen as superior to Raw by just about everyone, and perhaps on par or slightly better than SmackDown. (At least, it was better than SmackDown before Becky Lynch took over and made the show hers.)

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What’s different with NXT and 205 Live? A creative team more willing to do things differently than fall back oo the way things were. Triple H and his crew have a different attitude than Vince, and it clearly shows — how often does a TakeOver outshine the pay-per-view it shares a weekend with?

Some may see this as comparing apples to oranges — the main roster, with its television deals, are a much different animal than WWE Network programming. And some may want to give McMahon the benefit of the doubt, since wrestling as a whole is in a down period business-wise compared to the last boom in the late 1990s.

But to do that would give McMahon an out — it’s an excuse to allow him to continue the same old song and dance that has viewers tuning out at a record pace. If we accept that his return this coming Monday is the panacea that will cure WWE’s ills, then we give him the power to resist change.

Talent-wise, Raw and SmackDown are in a great place. A Superstar Shake-Up will mean next to nothing from a quality standpoint — it’s Malibu Stacy with a new hat. The entire WWE culture needs to change, and that starts with acknowledging that Vince McMahon can’t fix things by showing up on TV.

He needs to fix things by staying away.