Growing up as a wrestling fan in the late 80s and early 90s, I didn’t order pay-per-views. In turn, aside from home video purchases and the rare occasion of watching a pay-per-view at a friend’s house, almost all of the wrestling action I saw was the WWF and WCW’s weekly programming. Superstars and Wrestling Challenge were what I had from the WWF beyond the occasional Saturday Night Main Event specials.
Wrestling Challenge did have a one-off pay-per-view in the 80s, but the show itself was generally a mix of squash matches, promos to hype up pay-per-views, WWF Magazine promotion, live event announcements, recaps, “breaking news” and debut matches. And it didn’t take three hours to do that — it was a one-hour program. No, Hulk Hogan would not wrestle on this show, but he would be mentioned and might appear to cut a promo.
Raw gives us some of that, sure. For example, The Shining Stars had a squash match this week against jobbers for their “debut”; Primo and Epico were tag team champions a few years back, so it’s hard to call it a debut. Dana Brooke had her debut match. There were Smackdown recaps, including the “vicious attack” Chris Jericho laid unto Dean Ambrose. Upcoming live dates were flashed at the bottom of the screen during matches. So the formula of Wrestling Challenge is not entirely gone from the WWE of today.
But why not have a show dedicated to building up talent? Right now there is a lot of mid-card and lower-card talent not being used in a productive way. Tyler Breeze, for example, loses the majority of his matches to the point that when you see he’s in the ring against an opponent there are two likely scenarios — one, he loses within two minutes, or two, he beats someone via a distraction-based roll-up pin like most jobbers do. But Tyler Breeze wasn’t a jobber in NXT and he certainly didn’t come up to the main roster as a jobber. If he were able to appear on a weekly show like Wrestling Challenge — even if it were only shown on the WWE Network — and beat an enhancement wrestler, or have a competitive match against another lower-card guy, then you wouldn’t necessarily think he was going to lose the second he appears on Raw.
Another good usage of time in a show like this would be video packages. The WWE has always been excellent with charity work and getting its talent into mainstream appearances. Showcasing Titus O’Neil at one of his regular appearances — not just showing the social media snapshot — could be great for getting fans behind him as a babyface. Stephanie McMahon does a lot of media appearances that aren’t on my radar, which I would be interested in seeing, since she’s interesting. In general, a few seconds apiece of a few appearances a week by WWE Superstars both reinforces that the WWE is doing good around the world and keeps fresh content pumping out regularly.
In addition, do we really need all those recaps or replays during Raw or Smackdown? If they were needed for production and technical reasons, that’s one thing. If they were needed for advertising or product integration, that would also be understandable. But isn’t a lot of the audience watching via DVR or some form of on-demand option? In addition, if something were important, wouldn’t WWE be guaranteed to blast it out via social media and WWE.com? And if there were an interesting error of some sort, don’t the fans know where to find such archived online?
If these steps were taken, an added bonus would be that Raw and/or Smackdown can remain focused on the stories and action that sell the merchandise and get the majority of people watching. The fans that like the big stars and don’t overanalyze things can watch those shows. The fans that are completists and like to keep up on everything can watch everything, although they will now have better-flowing content that is more brand-aware. Otherwise, these three-hour Raw and two-hour Smackdown episodes will continue to try and be everything to everyone, but continue to not really deliver that much to anyone.
And to confirm that hindsight is 20/20, I do realize that Wrestling Challenge comes from the era when Papa Shango put a hex on Ultimate Warrior and had a lot to do with marketing the WBF to the WWF audience.
