WWE gave fans a grim glimpse of its post-WM future last week

Following a mostly successful two-night effort with WrestleMania 37, WWE had an opportunity to build on that momentum by setting a fresh course on the follow-up episodes of Raw and SmackDown.

Well, that didn’t happen.

Instead, fans sat through three hours of horrendous television on Monday and two more mediocre ones on Friday — with another round of callous mass layoffs sandwiched in between. At best, it felt like WWE was in a holding pattern. At worst, it was a worrying harbinger of what’s to come for the rest of the year.

WWE has set up a post-WrestleMania future that doesn’t look that exciting.

The April 12 episode of Raw and the April 16 edition of SmackDown did not provide viewers with exciting call-ups, hot angles to kickstart storylines, nor fresh opponents for the new and incumbent champions. Instead, fans were “treated” to:

• WrestleMania rematches that take place less than a week after the show (Rhea Ripley vs. Asuka, Kevin Owens vs. Sami Zayn, Drew McIntyre earning a rematch against Bobby Lashley for a show literally named WrestleMania Backlash)
• Non-finishes (Zayn getting counted out and taking a Stunner from Owens anyway, Ripley vs. Asuka ending with a Charlotte Flair run-in, Seth Rollins attacking Cesaro during Cesaro’s match with Jey Uso [so much for that push])
• Parity booking (Damian Priest losing a handicap match via surprise rollup to The Miz and John Morrison a day after beating them in a tag match with Bad Bunny)
• Backwards character alignment (positioning Alexa Bliss as the heel against a man who abducted and brainwashed her)
• Driving home that wins and losses don’t matter (Mandy Rose and Dana Brooke intentionally getting themselves counted out against WWE Women’s Tag Team Champions Nia Jax and Shayna Baszler, which color commentator Byron Saxton said was “better” for the babyface duo than winning)
• Running cool stuff into the ground (repeatedly showing Cesaro’s UFO spot)
• Unnecessary HEAT! just for the sake of it (Dolph Ziggler and Robert Roode beating The Street Profits to retain the SmackDown Tag Team Championships)

All of these things have become part of the WWE experience for a long time, but at least they TRY to make you think they’ll do something a little different coming out of “The Showcase of the Immortals”.

In that sense, you could thank WWE for forgoing any pretense of a reset, but given how much praise WrestleMania received, it was disappointing to see the company revert back the same bad habits as quickly as 24 hours later.

Worse yet, it was a sign that the fans who plan on sticking around for future shows can expect this for the rest of the year. After all, this is a promotion that produces five hours of weekly main roster television and will likely stage at least one PPV per month.

Despite boasting the most opulent talent roster of any wrestling organization, WWE only have a finite amount of match combinations available to fill that volume of content. So you know what that means: WWE will probably pad things out with endless rematches to extend those feuds and an equally bottomless amount of win trading and non-finishes to necessitate those rematches. Even the few things they got right this week — Bianca Belair’s star treatment as SmackDown Women’s Champion and the Viking Raiders’ return — could fall prey to this at some point.

Sure, going the nihilistic route with WWE is the easy thing to do these days, but WWE could’ve made it easier to push those concerns aside for at least a week by giving fans a smidge of hope that things would be at least a little different.

Unfortunately, it thought giving folks the same old tropes was even easier than that.