Thursday, September 5, 2013

Best Coast Bias: Misfits, Inaction

Guys are now so afraid of Orton a show is virtually dedicated to him
Photo Credit: WWE.com
What's more compelling, three matches spread out over an hour or two guys in suits talking for about a fourth of that?

It says a lot that in this week's particular instance, Michael Cole interviewing Triple H over at WWE.com about RKOCorp (™ ButchCorp) was more compelling with 25% of the time given against Ion's flagship programming.  Triple H dissembled, double-talked, sounded like a press release, and somehow made it compelling while advancing both short-term and long-term storylines as if he had hooked up with my NSA watcher and gotten a copy of the forthcoming Coast To Coast.

Main Event?

...ha, jeez.

Usually I have a lot of notes on WWEME; what transpires and some of the outside goings-on.  Now that I'm covering NXT those notes in first draft look like a small Vonnegut piece before I start going in with the editing machete.   This week for Main, I had a record-low ten lines used  and some of that small amount was drabs and the end of sentences.

Chalk it up to a bad decision to have two up-and-coming tag teams headbutt up against each other in the final four minutes of the show.  You read that rightly - a mistake compounded by another larger one.  There's nothing wrong with another Wyatt Family victory, but that fast against the Prime Time Players, who're just starting to get some momentum under their own wing?  Given time that could've been perfectly serviceable pay-per-view undercard fodder but here Darren Young got a hot tag (LOL at a hot tag shorter than a Kanye track) and in succinct order got his head MURDERDEATHLARIATed and then Sister Abigailed post-match. 

It's not like they had to rush through this match because another Ziggler/Cesaro or Shield/Usos and Henry happened -- in both Damien Sandow's loss to R-Truth (that is not a typo) or Fandango's win over Justin Gabriel the matches were plodding affairs marred by too much stalling, too many Ortonian chinlocks, and nothing compelling happening, a bunch of cul-de-sacs not forming an interlocking community plan.  Both of these matches which quite frankly would've been better served in the shorter time frame got two segments apiece and only served as slightly noisy static to the Matthews/Riley team trying to figure out where they were going to go from here in the opening moments of Vince McMahon's 1984.  And again, the people not wrestling were more compelling than the ones who were, a problem in a land that is supposed to foster on character development and showing a little high-risk if it keeps the attention of the fan.

A long-time grizzled vet like myself knew to expect the darkest, most horrible timeline back in mid-July.  But I never expected to see everything around Main Event flourish while the Wednesday night forgotten gem lost a lot of sparkle.

And yet.