WWE: Let’s not overlook The Miz’s character development on SmackDown

The last episode of WWE SmackDown saw a plethora of interesting developments, but perhaps the most interesting was The Miz’s character development with Daniel Bryan.

Last Friday, we saw a surprising Lacey Evans babyface turn, the teased return of Sheamus and his pre-stupid hair, the return of Alexa Bliss, a rampage from Roman Reigns and potentially the last we’ll ever see of Daniel Bryan’s hair. However, among all of the kerfuffle that the WWE Universe got to see on SmackDown is one key, subtle moment between The Miz and Daniel Bryan.

For almost an entire year now, The Miz has been in a rut of sorts since his babyface turn against Shane McMahon. Struggling to pick up wins and failing to do so consistently. It seems as though this rut was enough to force Miz to get a big gulp of the good ole humble pie as he was able to praise longtime rival Bryan and highlight how important the goat faced GOAT was to the bigger picture of Friday Night SmackDown.

It’s a moment that has been overlooked by the masses, but Mith Gifs on Twitter highlighted this in a tweet. The moment where as Bryan contemplated putting himself through Hell for another fight against The Fiend, The Miz tried his best to talk the former WWE Champion out of it. Not only because of how battling The Fiend “changes” people (i.e. it served as a catalyst to Seth Rollins lashing out against the Raw roster and Finn Balor turning heel), but because Bryan is simply too important to the SmackDown roster to allow himself to be mentally or physically destroyed by The Fiend.

It’s unclear if this will develop into anything further than this segment; if it’ll lead to alliance between the two or solidified a face turn after Miz seemed to quietly turn heel these past couple weeks, but this was a refreshing side to see of The Miz.

After years of wars with Bryan, especially after their war of words on Talking Smack where Miz called Bryan a coward for retiring, this segment displayed a level of growth I can’t recall ever seeing from The Miz.

It’s few and far between we see this level of tasteful character development from a WWE Superstar and in terms of how well it was executed, it just deserves a little more attention than it’s gotten lately.