5 WWE Women’s Wrestling Takeaways: New Era Fizzles Fast

The holiday season is never kind to WWE. Pretaped shows make for innately less exciting television, but Raw and SmackDown are really stinking up the place lately. Maybe this wouldn’t be so noticeable if the entire McMahon family hadn’t just promised that this is officially the beginning of a new era.

My advice to Vince McMahon circa two weeks ago would be to hold off on that “shaking things up” speech he gave about starting anew until after the New Year, because what has followed has been a truckload of the exact same drivel we’ve seen each and every week for months.

Women’s wrestling, specifically, has been booked incredibly lazily, and this week WWE furthered the damage done by last week’s Christmas Eve and Christmas Day shows.

Credit: WWE.com

Is This Really A New Era?

If anyone asked me about my favorite type of wrestling match, the first thing I’d say is “anything but a six-person tag team match.” There are obviously exceptions, like when The Shield faced off with the Wyatt Family, but generally there is no lazier way to give screen time to underutilized stars than to throw them into one big tag match.

And goodness, guys, we got another one this week, and it’s one we’ve seen some variation of a hundred times lately.

Sasha Banks, Bayley and Ember Moon defeated the Riott Squad and blah, blah, I don’t even care. I love that WWE wants to give all these amazing women time on screen but it’s painfully obvious that time is just being bought until the Women’s Tag Team Titles are introduced.

The main event, which I’m happy to say is regularly occupied by women these days, was okay. Raw Women’s Champion Ronda Rousey teamed with Natalya to face Nia Jax and Tamina Snuka. Predictably, Rousey made Tamina tap out to pick up the win and … that’s all. Nothing else, really.

I sincerely hope this lack of imagination is a result of the holiday season, but as of this moment, the “new era” we were promised is looking like all hot air being blown.

To me, it feels like the McMahons told us it’s a new day for WWE and expected that to convince us to look at the same boring television they’ve already been producing with different eyes and see something wholly new and exciting.

It’s not.