BRM Reviews the 8/23/2016 Smackdown (TERRIBLE)

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Big Red Machine
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BRM Reviews the 8/23/2016 Smackdown (TERRIBLE)

Post by Big Red Machine » Aug 24th, '16, 17:19

OPENING SEGMENT- We start off with a scene in the locker room. People are standing around talking. Rhyno is praising Apollo Crews… but in the background, we have Baron Corbin, the douchebag bully loner… apparently having a friendly conversation… with ERICK ROWAN. These are the two least likely people in the locker room to be having a conversation with ANYONE, never mind with each other! Could they really not find two other undercard guys to be extras?
Also of note is Dolph Ziggler sitting in a chair, slumped over with his head in his hands, not talking to anyone.
AJ Styles shows up and jovially announces that he is “the new face that runs this place.” He spots Dolph and taunts him about his loss. He lowers leans down so that he is talking right in Dolph’s ear and loudly proclaims “I don’t like LOSERS!”
DOLPH HEADBUTTS AJ! It’s on…
Very briefly until it is broken up. Dolph shouts at AJ to “stay the hell away from me! And mind your own business!”
I thought this was a great segment, showing us that the results of our top matches at SummerSlam have had consequences.

UNVEILING OF THE CHAMPIONSHIPS, & OTHER STUFF- HORRENDOUS ON EVERY LEVEL!
We’ve got the entire women’s division and tag team division in the ring with two tables with the belts on them. The wrestlers don’t get their own entrances… but of course Shane and Bryan each get individual entrances. Remember that time they promised us it would be all about the wrestlers and not about the authority figures? LOL. Even if we ignore that part it… if I’m doing this segment, I don’t give anyone an entrance just to save time. I probably don’t have all of the wrestlers in the ring, either. Just have either Bryan or Shane (there is no point in having both of them) unveil the championships and announce how we’re going to determine who our first champions will be.
The belts… look terrible. If you thought the current WWE Tag Team Titles were ugly, wait until you see these. People have criticized the those belts for looking like pennies… well these look like rusty pennies with an ugly dark blue strap instead of the traditional black.
The one for the women looks just like the WWE Women’s Title except it has a blue background instead of a red one. You want to know how to make a championship NOT feel special? Have TWO of them. And that’s what these belts are. Right down to the name: It’s the “Smackdown Women’s Championship.” Not the real “WWE Women’s Championship” with no qualifiers that they made such a big deal out of less than five months ago at WrestleMania. You have to go to Raw if you want to see that: i.e. the show with Charlotte, Sasha, Paige, and Bayley, plus Nia Jax and Dana Brooke who we know WWE are both high on because of their look. This is Smackdown, with Becky Lynch- because we had to throw Smackdown a bone- and Nattie Neidhart, who WWE obviously doesn’t see as any type of star based on her grand total of ONE title reign in eight years- and some of that was time when WWE had TWO women’s titles… and despite being the most talented woman in the company for pretty much all of that time. And a bunch of girls no one gives a crap about, almost half of whom would still be in developmental if they hadn’t needed to fill out the Smackdown roster because of the brand extension!
But don’t worry. Smackdown is totally not the B show anymore. It’s got the better tag team division. You know… that thing Vince doesn’t give a sh*t about? And even then, it didn’t get to keep the real titles, and the only teams Vince seems to have any long-term interest in (New Day, Gallows & Anderson, and Enzo & Cass), plus the all-time legendary Dudley Boyz are on Raw.

But going back to that thing about having two titles making the championships mean less…
You want to know how to compound the problem? Have both championships look pretty much the same. If these were traditional-looking title belts it would be passable because that’s what title belts are supposed to look like, but when you’ve got the big, goofy WWE logo as the entirety of the belt plate with a f*cking colored background, it just emphasizes the sameness. The red for Raw and blue for Smackdown are intended to differentiate between the belts, but, ironically, they serve as an indication that the shows themselves are the same, just with some different faces and a different color scheme.


Because the wrestlers are standing there in the ring, we’ve got to have Shane waste time with a speech about opportunity. Then he kicks it over to Dragon, and now it’s Dragon’s turn to waste time putting over the women standing in front of him for all being “fantastic” at SummerSlam. To get this line out without screaming or laughing, I figure he probably had to close his eyes and pretend Carmella was Sara Del Rey.
No praise for the tag team division. Instead they got Daniel Bryan giving them a speech about what it takes to be a successful tag team. Because these guys who make their livings as tag team wrestlers need to be told how important it is to trust their partners.

For the women, the inaugural champion will be determined at Backlash in a Six-Pack challenge: in other words, every match we’ve had since the brand split hasn’t meant a damn thing (including the match last night that Bryan just praised them for), and now we’re going to be getting another three weeks of pointless matches.
The tag teams at least get to have a tournament, although I’m not even sure how that is going to work with just six teams. Before Bryan could explain how this would work, F*CKING HEATH SLATER interrupted him. He came out through the crowd- you know, because he’s not part of the roster (even though he has been allowed to just walk around backstage the last three weeks)- except he did so HOLDING A WWE MICROPHONE, HOOKED UP TO THE ARENA PA SYSTEM! Not even TNA would make that mistake!
This is the point where I start to get offended. If you’re going to have a guy come out through the crowd because he is a free agent, to not realize that letting him do so while using an official WWE microphone hooked up to PA completely kills what you are trying to do leaves one of two possibilities:
A) the people writing this have the IQ of a doorknob, or
B) they think that the fans do.
Neither is good, but even the possibility that the answer is B REALLY pisses me off.

Heath is also allowed to just walk right through the timekeeper’s area with no one trying to stop him.
He just gets into the ring and says he wants to challenge for a title and points to the women’s belt. Dragon points out that he’s a man so he can’t be women’s champion. This is supposed to be funny. Heath then says that he wants to challenge for the tag titles. Shane says he can’t because he’s not a member of the roster, but “more importantly, you don’t have a tag team partner.” No! It’s not more important that he doesn’t have a partner. It’s more important that he’s not a member of the roster because the fact that he’s not a member of the roster means that HE SHOULDN’T EVEN BE HERE!
Heath guarantees that he can find a partner and win the whole tournament, so Dragon tells him that if he can find a partner by the end of the night, he can be entered into the tournament “making it an eight-team tournament.” Eight? I only see seven! We’ve got American Alpha, the Usos, Hype Bros., the Vaudevillains, Breeze & Fandango, and the Ascension is six plus Heath’s team would make seven. This fact is completely glossed over.
Shane tells Heath that because he guaranteed victory, he will only be a member of the roster if he wins the entire tournament. Oh. That’s nice. They put a stipulation on this. I sure hope they stick to this one, as opposed to EVERY OTHER TIME WE’VE SEEN HEATH SLATER ON SMACKDOWN, where no matter whether Heath won or not THEY COMPLETELY IGNORED THE STIPULATION ABOUT HEATH GETTING A CONTRACT.

AJ Styles comes out and says this is all BS! Finally, a voice of reason!

Or not. AJ isn’t saying the fact that they keep letting Heath in his dumb. He is just being a pissy heel who is upset that people are spending time talking about the tag team division and the women’s division instead of talking about him… which is EXACTLY what Seth Rollins over on Raw would do in this same situation. Different day, same sh*t.
The whole reason AJ came out here in the first place was so Dolph could jump him from behind. They start to brawl but Shane orders everyone to break them up… so we get yet another pull-apart brawl between these same guys. I don’t know what the point of this was. I thought the locker room segment did a tremendous job of doing exactly what this did (set up for a match between Dolph and AJ), except that involved Dolph going to violence as a frustrated and morally wrong but understandable response to AJ’s taunting, especially given his mental state right now. This was Dolph jumping AJ from behind even though Dolph had already gotten his licks in earlier.

We go to commercial, and when we come back, Becky Lynch has her music playing (did they really send her to the back just to go do her entrance again, or did they just play it?), and she is apparently about to face Alexa Bliss! STILL no one has noted that there aren’t as many tag teams as Bryan said there were, and we have no idea how this tag team tournament will work… but here’s a women’s match which we already told you won’t matter one bit to anything regarding the new title.

ALEXA BLISS! vs. BECKY LYNCH- 3.5/10 (but they did everything they could with the time they had)
In a completely unintentional bit of comedy (or possibly it was and Mauro is more sly than we give him credit for), Mauro Ranallo told us that Alexa Bliss! is on the cover of “a magazine you’re very familiar with Mr. Otunga: Muscle & Fitness: Hers.” So either Mauro is implying that Otunga does body workouts designed for women, or Mauro is implying that Otunga spends his time enjoying the pictures in that magazine rather than the articles if you know what I mean.
Both Nattie AND Naomi are on commentary for this match. I expect this sort of thing to continue for every single women’s match until the PPV, with all of them taking turns winning, losing, and saying the same stuff on commentary. You know… to “build” to the PPV match. And boy does this ever “build” to the PPV match, assuming that your definition of “build” is loose enough to include just dumping pails full of sand on top of each other, as opposed to a more traditional definition in which your end result would be a sandcastle rather than just a pile of sand.
Mauro starts off by focusing on the women in the ring, talking about their previous match, which took place two weeks ago recapping the finish and explaining why this time might be different. Then JBL just drags the entire thing off course and into sh*t-land. He says to Nattie that “I understand you said that you that you should actually just be given that title.” A few issues here:
1. When did Nattie say this? This is the sort of thing that should be said in a promo on the air. You know… maybe have Nattie grab the mic in that big in-ring segment we just had where Shane and Dragon were talking about how the title would be awarded?
2. This is exactly what Seth Rollins did last night on Raw with the Universal Championship.
3. Nattie’s response was that she was deserves to be champion because she was “born better,” which is essentially Charlotte’s gimmick. You remember Charlotte, right? The other blonde woman born into a wrestling family, who is current the top heel over on Raw?
The lack of creativity in this company is f*cking astounding. First you’ve got the belts, and now you’ve got thirty writers who are doing a job that shouldn’t take more than eight people to do at the absolutely f*cking maximum, and they still run out of ideas in fifteen minutes. And it’s not just this, either. Look at the tag team tournament. Didn’t we just have an eight-team single elimination tag team tournament a few months ago? Show some creativity! You’ve got six teams and three weeks of TV to fill, so you might as well at least break them up into two block of three and do a short round-robin with the block winners meeting at the PPV. At least that would be different than what you did a few months ago (never mind how well it fits the TV schedule).

JBL then turns his attention to Naomi, first commenting on her glow in the dark outfit and then asking “you’re not going to turn that championship, if you win it, into something like that, are you?” Naomi gives response that indicates that maybe she will (*shudder*). Mauro then steps in to drag our attention back to the match, telling everyone that Naomi wants them to “feel the glow… as Becky Lynch felt that back elbow from Alexa Bliss!”
Almost all of Becky’s offense in this match was focused on Alexa’s arm, which Mauro and Otunga both did a good job of calling attention to. Becky won with the Disarmer, so Alexa suffers her first main-roster loss. At least I can console myself with the fact that this match doesn’t mean sh*t.

Not even twenty minutes into the show and I’m already onto page five. This show might well give some of those terrible TNA shows from 2014 a run for their money.

HEATH SLATER & MIZ BACKSTAGE- Heath thought Miz was listening to him but he was really on his cellphone.

SMACKDOWN TAG TEAM TITLE TOURNAMENT QUARTERFINAL MATCH: The Ascension vs. The Usos- 3/10
You know how Smackdown now has that neat little entrance graphic that will list the “accomplishments” of the wrestler or team coming to the ring? Well for the Usos, all it had was that they were “2-time Tag Team of the Year Slammy winners.” Because that’s definitely more important than the fact that they have been tag champs twice. Well… at least they’re better of The Ascension, who didn’t even get an entrance. The match was short. The Usos won.

JBL kept pushing the brand rivalry. Does any fan actually care about this? They split the brands up the way they did for purpose of getting people to watch both shows, so they split the most popular wrestlers evenly between the shows. Maybe there are a few people out there whose twelve favorite wrestlers got drafted to one show, but those people (if they exist at all), are extremely few and far between. Most fans have no emotional investment in one brand being superior to the other… and that’s the way it should be, because like I said, the point of this whole thing was to get people to watch BOTH shows. So please explain to me how it helps to accomplish this if both shows are saying “our show is better than their show,” which inherently denigrates the other show, instead of both shows simply saying “our show is great.”

AJ STYLES PROMO AND WWE TITLE STUFF SEGMENT- fine, I guess.
AJ comes out and brags about beating Cena. He says he deserves to be the #1 contender to the WWE World Heavyweight Title. Dolph comes out to fight, being held back by referees. Bryan comes out and says that AJ deserves to be #1 contender. Then he books these two in the main event, saying that if Dolph wins, he gets added to the WWE World Heavyweight Title match at Backlash.

NIKKI BELLA vs. CARMELLA- no rating. Fine segment, but could have been done better.
They had Renee Young there in the ring to interview Nikki. They did this AFTER Carmella made her entrance because the whole purpose of this was to set up Carmella turning heel by jumping Nikki from behind. If she was going to turn heel, was there really any reason for her to beat Nattie clean a few weeks ago? And if you want to turn her heel, you don’t need to set up this awkwardly-timed interview to do it: just have her cheat in the match. Or do the interview BEFORE the match and have Carmella jump Nikki without the awkward set-up. That way we can actually hear Nikki’s emotional promo about how happy she is to be back so that it will mean more when Carmella snatches that away from her.
So Carmella jumps Nikki from behind and keeps beating her up and hitting moves while the referee just stands there, saying “Carmella, stop. Don’t you do that!” Finally a second referee shows up and actually does his job, physically getting between Carmella and Nikki. Carmella stops the attack and starts to head to the back, and the referees check on Nikki. Then Carmella comes back and grabs Nikki… and now it’s BOTH referees just standing there saying “don’t you do it, Carmella! Don’t do that!” rather than trying to actually HELP in any way.

RANDY ORTON & BRAY WYATT SEGMENT- bad
JBL kept trying to push the narriative that Orto was just one more RKO away from beating Brock, but I rarely felt that way during the match, especially after Brock kicked out of the first one.
Randy comes out and cuts a promo about the finish of the match at SummerSlam saying he was unhappy with the TKO finish. Bray Wyatt interrupts him. He says that this was a reminder that Randy is “just a man.” Bray then said “I am not a man. I am a god.” Well… at least we know Bray Wyatt isn’t secretly Brian Cage. Bray concludes by saying “a god can never die. But don’t you worry. You’re going to find out all about it… in time.”
Is there anyone left on the face of the earth who gives a sh*t about Bray Waytt anymore? This character has been bled completely dry by YEARS of these “mysterious” “cryptic” promos that never amount to anything and never mean anything. He’s just a tool the writers use to waste time.
Randy wants to fight, but Bray decides to teleport away. If Bray can teleport at will, why did he walk out to ringside instead of saving his energy and teleporting?
In the only bit of this that was worth a damn (and I’m certain had nothing do to with the writers) when Bray’s teleporting darkness lifted, Randy made sure to look around to make sure Bray wasn’t behind him, because Randy Orton isn’t an idiot and knows how Bray usually operates.

AN INTERVIEWER INTERVIEWS SHANE ABOUT BROCK- Shane says he doesn’t think Steph will take Brock’s assault on him seriously, and cites the $500 fine. Shane then says “this thing with Brock Lesnar and myself is far from over.” I swear to God if they waste a Brock Lesnar match on SHANE MCMAHON I will throw something.

HEATH SLATER TRIES TO RECRUIT SOMEONE BACKSTAGE- this starts with Heath clearly talking to someone else, but the camera will only show us Heath until it’s time to reveal that he is talking to Arn Anderson, even though they’re standing right next to each other. I know that it’s WWE’s policy that we’re supposed to pretend that the cameras aren’t really there, but the Shane interview started with a cameraman randomly roaming the halls and coming across Shane as he was talking to a referee, and only then did the interviewer show up to interview Shane, like you would see in a TNA backstage segment. You can’t have it both ways, WWE.
Arn considers Heath’s request until Heath lets it slip that Arn wasn’t his first choice, at which point Arn walks off. I thought it was ridiculously stupid that THIS would be the thing that makes Arn decide not to team with Heath. Arn himself acknowledged that he was old, so why would he think Heath would come to him first? And why would he be so offended that he didn’t? If this was Ric Flair snubbing Arn I could almost buy it, but as was said in this segment: Heath Slater is not Ric Flair (breaking news, I know).
So Heath sulks until Rhyno walks up to him and offers to team with him, admitting that he had to be tag team champion to make the payments on his above ground pool. Well… because this show has already put me in a bad mood, and Heath Slater’s presence always makes it worse, I decided to do some checking up on this. Would you believe that Rhyno has only been tag team champion THREE times in his career, only in two different promotions? One of those promotions was Otto Wanz’s CWA in its dying days. Neither of these reigns lasted very long. His other tag team title reign was in a Canadian indy called CWE, in which he won the titles and then never wrestled there again for over two years, obviously being stripped of the tag titles in the interim. This information is freely out there on the internet and Rhyno has to know this… so why would he lie on national TV and give fodder to political opponents who are surely trying to dig up dirt on him to defeat him in the election?
Also… why would Rhyno want to team with a guy who tried to cheat against him just a few weeks ago?
As you can tell I hated this. All of this time devoted to Heath Slater segments should have gone to Alexa vs. Becky or Usos vs. Ascension.

BREEZE & FANDANGO IN THEIR LOUNGE- fine character work. They want to win the tag titles.

AMERICAN ALPHA PROMO- they did what they could with what they were given to make it sound a bit more like them, but Jason Jordan was forcing a smile on his face so hard while saying one or two of those lines that you knew he was screaming inside.

SMACKDOWN TAG TEAM TITLE TOURNAMENT QUARTERFINAL MATCH: American Alpha vs. Tyler Breeze & Fandango- 6.5/10
I was shocked that they gave these guys enough time to have a decent little match.

So we’ve had two matches in this tournament already, but they can’t even show us the brackets? We still don’t know who the eight team is… and they’ve never even acknowledged that they don’t have one yet! It’s not like they’re building it up as a mystery. They just seem to have miscounted and no one in the company has noticed.

DEAN AMBROSE INTERVIEW- terrible
He says dumb things and acts like a goofball. He almost admits that instead of being backstage at the show like wrestlers are supposed to be, he has been upstairs gambling at casino. I’m sure Bryan or Shane will have something to say about this, right?
And he’s going to be doing commentary on the main event. Oh joy.

IF ZIGGLER WINS, HE GETS ADDED TO THE WWE WORLD HEAVYWEIGHT TITLE MATCH AT BACKLASH: Dolph Ziggler vs. AJ Styles- 8/10
AJ wins with the Styles Clash. This match was awesome, but not enough to save this show- especially with Ambrose and JBL on commentary. Combined they did about 80% of the talking but only about 5% of the useful, relevant, intelligent talking. This show would be SOOOO much better if it was just Otunga and Mauro on commentary (Otunga was pretty good tonight).

A TERRIBLE episode of Smackdown despite the awesome main event. Any hope I had of WWE turning around after the draft is now pretty much dead.



STUPID ANNOUNCER QUOTES:
1. JBL asked Naomi if she had ever been in a match similar to a six-pack challenge.
This would be the same Naomi who was one part of a FOURTEEN-WAY Divas Title match… at WRESTLEMANIA… and JBL seems to have no memory of it, which shows you just how important the Divas Title was.
If you think that one is me being unfair to JBL, he followed up by asking “if you haven’t, what is your strategy? This isn’t a one-on-one match anymore.”
Does he really think she’s never been in a f*cking triple threat match before? COME ON!
(Naomi, for her part, responded by talking about how much she wanted the title, and said she was “more prepared than anyone” completely failing to answer JBL’s question.)

2. To explain her heel turn (while it is happening), JBL says “Carmella comes in here and she’s a draft pick: she starts getting ignored, so she makes a statement.”
Ignored? She’s been on every single show since the draft! And keep in mind that he is saying this RIGHT AFTER she has turned heel, so it’s not like he has any insight into her reasoning. This is just JBL coming up with an absolutely idiotic reason for something.

3. During the American Alpha vs. Breeze & Fandango match, after Mauro referenced Kyle Snyder becoming the youngest American to win an Olympic gold medal in wrestling, JBL responded by saying “yeah, but Kyle Snyder did have a guy with a fuzzy selfie-stick looking at him.”
Thank you, JBL for rubbing it in our faces that these two men competing in a tournament for a championship are total goofballs, and no one like them would be seen competing in the Olympics, because that sort of sh*t doesn’t happen in real sports. Suspension of disbelief is critical in pro wrestling, but here is JBL with his hacksaw, purposely cutting through the ropes that are holding everything up.

4. JBL said that AJ Styles “knows how to win big matches, which is something Dolph Ziggler doesn’t.”
This would be Dolph Ziggler the multiple time World Heavyweight Champion, Intercontinental Champion, and former Money in the Bank winner, who apparently doesn’t know how to win big matches.

5. JBL- “AJ Styles says he is now ‘the face that runs the place.’ And you can’t argue with him.”
Sure I can. He has now power whatsoever and therefore does not, in fact, “run the place.”
Hold #712: ARM BAR!

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KILLdozer
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Re: BRM Reviews the 8/23/2016 Smackdown (TERRIBLE)

Post by KILLdozer » Aug 24th, '16, 21:32

I saw Carmella had actually did some more of the ass-whip to Nikki Bella on the talking smack.

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KILLdozer
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Re: BRM Reviews the 8/23/2016 Smackdown (TERRIBLE)

Post by KILLdozer » Aug 25th, '16, 12:49

Ha though! At least they made the right call, Carmella was nowheres near over and just didn't have what it takes to be over .
When they come, they'll come at what you love.

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