L. Anne Carrington  

Show Notes

• Archived Blog Post

  Date / Time: 6/17/2009 5:23 PM UTC

  What's Happening to Monday Nights?
  

  What is happening to Monday nights?
  
  Judging from what I have been seeing on most of the fan boards and even WWE Universe threads on the subject of Monday Night Raw, the popular opinion is that of this particular brand is going downhill quality wise.
  
  Granted, the plan had been revealed to take Raw more into a “story line” direction while the other brands concentrate on more wrestling, but even in that direction, the show has seemed to have gone stale.
  
  Even introducing something new seemed to have fallen flat; in 2007, there was the whole limousine explosion fiasco, last year, there had been Million Dollar Mania (and we never did find out the end of that story of who caused the set to topple on Vince), and now here we are in the summer of 2009 with the one and only Donald Trump “buying” Raw.
  
  When this announcement was made, I had total déjà vu. Memories of pre-WrestleMania 23 Battle of the Billionaires, anyone?
  
  Or as in the “sale” itself, how about a throwback to the whole Alliance story line of 2001? Do you all see where this is going? Once again, we have not one, but two, recycled story lines.
  
  I will admit that this past week’s Raw started out quite strong, but went downhill from the second hour. While some of the matches were outstanding and given a great deal of time, there were others that either didn’t live up to their initial hype or if they were enjoyable, weren’t given the proper time.
  
  But I just discuss wrestling; I don’t actually work there.
  
  In any event, when it gets to the point when a show such as Superstars becomes more entertaining than Raw–WWE’s “flagship” show–there is something totally amiss that warrants more changes than a gimmick sale of the show.
  
  There’s a lot of talent on the roster that needs to be used and utilized. Seeing the same faces in the same matches in the same stories week after weeks grows stale and fans tend to become bored and flip the channel. In turn, this affects ratings, though in the past couple of weeks, Raw’s ratings have been up.
  
  The question is, however, how long will that last, especially taking into consideration WWE’s stock went down after the announcement of the gimmick sale of Raw to Donald Trump?
  
  Next week, Raw will be “viewer friendly” and run its usual two hours without any commercial breaks. I am both curious as to how well this will go over with its viewing audience as well as wondering if that extra time that won’t be spent on airing commercials will be used wisely.
  
  I suppose we will have to wait and see.
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  • WWE
  • Monday Night RAW
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