When a promotion has been around as long as WWE has, it’s bound to have spells of less-than-ideal creativity when it comes to the product. Also, WWE is far from the only promotion that experiences these lean periods.
To a far lesser extent, New Japan Pro Wrestling is going through something similar. Ring of Honor has slowly dug itself out of one over the last year or so. Lord knows TNA/Impact Wrestling’s ups and downs have been well documented. And eventually — hopefully, not anytime soon — All Elite Wrestling will experience this at some level, too.
For WWE, though, the staleness of its booking often manifests in ways that leave fans baffled at what they just saw, if not turned off on the promotion altogether.
Over the years, WWE has relied on some weird booking tropes that often make its fanbase groan. But which of these plot devices stand out amongst the rest?
If you’ve watched WWE for a while — or, at least, since 2001 — many of these idiosyncracies won’t be new to you, but it’ll still be fun to see how often the company has turned to these strategies in lieu of trying something new.
Sure, there’s nothing wrong with going back to some reliable tropes every once in a while — if it works, it works — but when a booker uses these five storytelling gimmicks over and over again, it could indicate a larger problem.
5. WWE booking bickering/Odd Couple/singles stars as tag team champions
When reflecting on the great tag teams of the past and present, common traits like teamwork, continuity, and familiarity are often at the top of the list. At the very least, the two people teaming together should like each other or be able to have a conversation that doesn’t end with an argument or outright disgust.
In WWE, however, the opposite is far too often true. As of Oct. 11, three of the company’s tag team champions are comprised of two singles wrestlers that it couldn’t find anything else to do with. And 99 percent of the time, they either can’t get along (but somehow win matches against actual cohesive teams) or have gimmicks that are diametrically opposed to one another.
At some point, Vince McMahon is going to strip away the pretense, name two wrestlers Oscar Madison and Felix Unger, and give them a tag team title reign that lasts as long as a Tech N9ne album.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with taking two singles wrestlers and establishing them as a full-time tag team. Even doing the Odd Couple stuff can work for a little while (see: Team Hell No) but going to this well as much as WWE does undercuts the idea that the titles are won by the best teams.
4. WWE opening their TV shows with a promo instead of a match
These days, it’s harder to find an episode of Raw or SmackDown that starts with a match instead of someone marching to the ring and monologuing like they’re hosting an episode of Saturday Night Live.
Actually, comparing a show-opening promo in WWE to SNL isn’t fair; at least the SNL opening bit with the host only lasts about 3-5 minutes. These soliloquies in WWE can last up to 15 minutes, and unless someone like Becky Lynch, Roman Reigns, John Cena, New Day, or any other skilled orator with a modicum of creative freedom is wielding the mic, that’s 15 minutes of exposition and unnatural WWE dialogue that the audience in the arenas and at home has to sit through.
Also, most of these segments follow the same, tired format:
- Wrestler welcomes fans to “MONDAY NIGHT RAW” or SmackDown for a cheap pop
- Wrestler discusses the current developments in their storyline
- Archrival wrestler(s) interrupt
- A match challenge/title shot declaration is made
- Authority figures who didn’t book the rest of the show yet come out and book matches
- Wrestlers brawl/hit their finishers on each other
Even when WWE announced that a TV show will start with a match, they still find a way to cram in a bunch of talking before the opening bell rings. Much like the previous trope, there’s nothing wrong with using this from time to time, but for a promotion that dedicates so much time on these shows to promos and skits, opening the proceedings with a hot match would be a welcome change.
3. WWE’s use of heel authority figures
To be fair, WWE hasn’t turned to the heel authority figure trope nearly as much as they have in the past, but it’s still something the promotion turns to whenever it finds itself in a creative bind.
Ever since the Mr. McMahon vs. “Stone Cold” Steve Austin feud ushered in WWE’s ’90s renaissance, the company has tried to recapture that magic. While many talented wrestlers (John Cena, CM Punk, Daniel Bryan, Eddie Guerrero, Roman Reigns) and on-air characters (Paul Heyman, Eric Bischoff, Kurt Angle, Vickie Guerrero, Triple H, Stephanie McMahon, Vince on a few other occasions) occupied both roles to the best of their abilities, they couldn’t reach those lofty heights.
But that won’t keep WWE from trying, even though literally every other promotion on the planet has moved on since the turn of the 21st century.
Without dynamic performances or the ideal conditions to make the storyline work, all the heel authority figure trope does is invite fans to dissect the numerous plot holes that pop up once they have a chance to think about what they’ve just seen. Sometimes, it doesn’t even take that long.
As of Oct. 11, WWE is using this trope to build the Naomi/Sonya Deville feud, which finally gives Naomi a storyline of substance, but also comes with the usual concerns associated with the gimmick. If WWE is smart, it will use this to transition Deville into a full-time wrestler role and put the heel authority figure character in a lockbox for at least a couple of decades.
2. Contract signings in WWE
When used once or twice a year for a big-money match, televised contract signings in wrestling can add some gravitas to an already-anticipated showdown, hence why most North American promotions use the trope. It becomes a problem, though, when you book these segments once or twice a month, as WWE does.
For the largest wrestling company in the world with a robust creative team and a supposed “creative genius” having the final say, that’s unacceptable. It’s gotten to the point where WWE has, among other things, scripted wrestlers to withhold signing the contracts for various amounts of time and positioned wrestlers in different parts of the arena to spice these things up.
And let’s not start on how silly it is that, in-storyline, the company promotes a match for weeks before any of the participants sign the document that makes the match official (though WWE hyping up a match before all the particulars are in order is very on-brand for them).
Again, this is something that can work in moderation, but it’s time for WWE to find new ways to promote matches (or rediscover old things that worked).
1. WWE’s use of non-finishes, DQs, countouts, and 50/50 booking
In real sports, there’s a reason why teams that finish with the same amount of wins and losses don’t receive as much fanfare as their more dominant contemporaries. But this fact hasn’t stopped WWE from enacting a booking strategy where wrestlers trade wins back and forth.
Booking wrestlers this way ensures that no one outside of a handful of stars accumulates any momentum with the audience while also watering down the importance of wins and losses — why would the fans care about the consequences of a wrestler winning or losing if they think that said wrestler will simply lose/win the next match?
WWE’s fear of having wrestlers lose also manifests itself in a much worse way: disqualifications, countouts, and other non-finishes.
Not so sound like a broken record (perhaps “scratched CD” would be a slightly less dated way to put that), but this is something that can work in small doses and in the right circumstance. But using it in perpetuity to keep wrestlers from eating a pinfall or tapping out carries the same effects as the win swapping: It conditions the audience to ignore the matches since the result doesn’t matter and further disconnects them from the storyline journey the wrestler is on.
Unfortunately, WWE turning itself into a content mill likely means that these aren’t going away anytime soon, but the promotion will never get out of this creative rut until they start trimming these finishes down.