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| Babyfaces! ...hooray? Photo Credit: WWE.com |
There's nothing like finding out Total Divas got picked up for another season over at the Exclamation Point to make certain neurons fire for the first time in some time, slightly stunned and surprised they still remember the chorus to Nine Inch Nails'"Heresy".
And yet in the continual Stamford quest to turn into Disney Northeast, they unleashed a weird, weird world. Perhaps they were freed up by the fact they were using Main Event as a canvas a mere few days before a PPV and knew they could pick and choose what to keep and what to ignore at will, with it leaning heavily into the former.
Alberto Del Rio came out and virtually destroys Santino Marella in a showcase that made him look better in the under five minutes it took than either of his World Championship reigns earlier in the year. Miz turned heel on Monday, then proceeded to talk up Kofi Kingston during the Jamaican's match against Fandango and only got involved after his former rival/dancing aficionado got thrown into him. Not only that, outside of a couple ripostes aimed at Mathews he didn't say anything heelish at all. Kofi almost deserved to get rolled up with a handful of tights given the fact he's already got a match against Miz on the preshow that was created solely from the turn two days ago and they haven't liked each other ever since Kofi stiffed him on a Trouble In Paradise on this very here program months ago.
The Chickbusters reunited, but Mike Patton lied to me. Peaches and Herb were apparently charlatans. It felt like a "that's weird/stupid/short-sighted/depressing" thing that could've been smoothed over with even a little bit of attention paid to storytelling. Naomi and Tamina sort of wrestled a lumberjill match notable for nothing besides almost no lumberjill involvement from anyone and a nice superkick at the end.
So since the match has gotten everything it deserved, let's get into the alignment problem WWE continues to come acropper on in bits and pieces in the undercard. Granted, as a longtime atheist when it comes to the reality TV church this reshuffling of the Divas division was probably going to fall flat with me. It rekindles nothing but memories of restarting Madden on a SNES when your perfect season was suddenly slipping away from your fingers out of pure enmity. The Bellas still do the Ace Ventura taunt, but hooray. Either Naomi or Cameron in real life apparently missed out on the Flavor Of Love auditions and throw beverages at drivers. (That's the :20 of the show I've seen, and one of the Usos tricked me on a drunken scroll through the dial since my brain cells addled by double IPA had to confirm it was Sunday.) And the less said about JoJo and Eva Marie attempting to wrestle than pose at this point, doubly castigatable by the surfeit of talent and logic abounding on NXT, the better.
Why are these women cheerable? Is there even a reason besides becoming more fodder for a network that may never come? Because on TV to those of us who've paid attention for multiple weeks, it looks like a slipshod version of Network where the response to the reason we should cheer them is "because they're on television, dummy"--something that they were already on. You know, by dint of wrestling and whatnot.
Kanye West acts like an aggrandizing jerk at times, and is called on it immediately. Amy Poehler is generally awesome, and is noted for it almost immediately. Outside of Natalya there doesn't seem to be a member of the seven-woman squad lined up above that I'd root for before Alicia Fox, let alone the people on the dark hats I really enjoy, and their reward is---cheers! Pushes! The pushing of a big, red, giant, candy-like reset button nullifying everything that happened before the show took root and got ratings! HUZZAH!
To quote Thom Yorke's reaction to Fox News, "And I think to myself, I must be missing something." Then again, maybe I'm not. The entire problem might be a case of 20/20 vision, of being doomed to being something along the lines of a true believer destined to be jilted when there's mainstream attention (read: $) to be had elsewhere in greater quantities by people who could barely spell NXT, let alone find Full Sail on a map. Vince McMahon is in bed with Ryan Seacrest -- Kelly Kelly's been wished out to the cornfield in lieu of Kim and Kourtney -- and in the Earth-2 this world is continually turning into it appears Daniel Bryan and Lamar Odom are going to be brothers-in-law.
It just gets you down sometimes, looking at what WWE stands for and knowing just by using Occam's Razor that in their desire to take over the first initial they lean too heavy on the third sometimes and that makes the second one almost completely ancillary. Knowing that at the end their version of the narrative is the one that wins out widely and there's always another source, another way for them to preach their evangel.
And yet, at the end of the day, I must make my witness.
And yet in the continual Stamford quest to turn into Disney Northeast, they unleashed a weird, weird world. Perhaps they were freed up by the fact they were using Main Event as a canvas a mere few days before a PPV and knew they could pick and choose what to keep and what to ignore at will, with it leaning heavily into the former.
Alberto Del Rio came out and virtually destroys Santino Marella in a showcase that made him look better in the under five minutes it took than either of his World Championship reigns earlier in the year. Miz turned heel on Monday, then proceeded to talk up Kofi Kingston during the Jamaican's match against Fandango and only got involved after his former rival/dancing aficionado got thrown into him. Not only that, outside of a couple ripostes aimed at Mathews he didn't say anything heelish at all. Kofi almost deserved to get rolled up with a handful of tights given the fact he's already got a match against Miz on the preshow that was created solely from the turn two days ago and they haven't liked each other ever since Kofi stiffed him on a Trouble In Paradise on this very here program months ago.
The Chickbusters reunited, but Mike Patton lied to me. Peaches and Herb were apparently charlatans. It felt like a "that's weird/stupid/short-sighted/depressing" thing that could've been smoothed over with even a little bit of attention paid to storytelling. Naomi and Tamina sort of wrestled a lumberjill match notable for nothing besides almost no lumberjill involvement from anyone and a nice superkick at the end.
So since the match has gotten everything it deserved, let's get into the alignment problem WWE continues to come acropper on in bits and pieces in the undercard. Granted, as a longtime atheist when it comes to the reality TV church this reshuffling of the Divas division was probably going to fall flat with me. It rekindles nothing but memories of restarting Madden on a SNES when your perfect season was suddenly slipping away from your fingers out of pure enmity. The Bellas still do the Ace Ventura taunt, but hooray. Either Naomi or Cameron in real life apparently missed out on the Flavor Of Love auditions and throw beverages at drivers. (That's the :20 of the show I've seen, and one of the Usos tricked me on a drunken scroll through the dial since my brain cells addled by double IPA had to confirm it was Sunday.) And the less said about JoJo and Eva Marie attempting to wrestle than pose at this point, doubly castigatable by the surfeit of talent and logic abounding on NXT, the better.
Why are these women cheerable? Is there even a reason besides becoming more fodder for a network that may never come? Because on TV to those of us who've paid attention for multiple weeks, it looks like a slipshod version of Network where the response to the reason we should cheer them is "because they're on television, dummy"--something that they were already on. You know, by dint of wrestling and whatnot.
Kanye West acts like an aggrandizing jerk at times, and is called on it immediately. Amy Poehler is generally awesome, and is noted for it almost immediately. Outside of Natalya there doesn't seem to be a member of the seven-woman squad lined up above that I'd root for before Alicia Fox, let alone the people on the dark hats I really enjoy, and their reward is---cheers! Pushes! The pushing of a big, red, giant, candy-like reset button nullifying everything that happened before the show took root and got ratings! HUZZAH!
To quote Thom Yorke's reaction to Fox News, "And I think to myself, I must be missing something." Then again, maybe I'm not. The entire problem might be a case of 20/20 vision, of being doomed to being something along the lines of a true believer destined to be jilted when there's mainstream attention (read: $) to be had elsewhere in greater quantities by people who could barely spell NXT, let alone find Full Sail on a map. Vince McMahon is in bed with Ryan Seacrest -- Kelly Kelly's been wished out to the cornfield in lieu of Kim and Kourtney -- and in the Earth-2 this world is continually turning into it appears Daniel Bryan and Lamar Odom are going to be brothers-in-law.
It just gets you down sometimes, looking at what WWE stands for and knowing just by using Occam's Razor that in their desire to take over the first initial they lean too heavy on the third sometimes and that makes the second one almost completely ancillary. Knowing that at the end their version of the narrative is the one that wins out widely and there's always another source, another way for them to preach their evangel.
And yet, at the end of the day, I must make my witness.