Day: January 26, 2016

Professional Wrestling is not real. Yes, the pain and the punches are real, but the outcome is scripted. This is the beauty and ultimately the downfall of World Wrestling Entertainment. The fix is in, and as such the only way to create truly memorable moments is to script them. As the WWE found out, that is very hard to do.

Nobody could’ve predicted the ridiculous blowout of the once-proud AZ Cardinals by a haughty and hardcore Panthers team with a chip on its shoulder. As the game unfolded, my kids and friends and I stood there stunned at Carson’s collapse. We knew it to be real and as such we were genuinely surprised at how thoroughly he soiled the bed.

The same cannot be said for wrestling. After the game we turned on the Royal Rumble in hopes of surprise and excitement. Now my kids still want to believe wrestling is real, but they also want to watch a hero win matches. The WWE knows this (though they also know that a lot of kids watch the show and still book pay per views way after bedtime on a sunday night). How then can a writing staff (once anchored by Freddie Prinze Jr.) still maintain a reasonable level of drama for a fickle and ‘wrestling smart’ crowd?

They can’t.

The problem with wrestling as I see it is a lack of star power and believable story. I am afraid the writers and leadership have been in that game so long that they’ve lost sight of the changes that are constantly happening with the world and the fan base and are truly stumbling around in the dark trying to make something worthwhile happen. I can prove this in two ways:

1. They had to bring back the Rock to hold on to the fans.
2. They tried to push Roman Reigns as the next big thing and wound up scripting him with an identical Royal Rumble set up to Steve Austin’s back in the 90’s and echoes of the last Wrestlemania with Brock Lesnar.

Nothing is new anymore. Nothing surprises fans and all the scripting serves to do is to gradually let us down. They don’t know what we want because we don’t know what we want other than to see something new and unpredictable and something we haven’t seen before.

We want to see something real.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Kevin Durant just called Porzingas a unicorn. So that happened.

Californication may be one of my favorite ‘writer’ shows of all time. I dig the vibe of the flawed character that Duchovny conjured, in part from his own jacked up morality and life. Unfortunately I’ve come to identify him as Hank Moody and less so as Fox Mulder of the X-Files. This, bad scripting, too much CGI, and a very strange looking Scully led me down the road to disappointment.

The X-Files should’ve stayed over. Duchovny’s Moody impersonation of a failed FBI agent seems more fun than fib, as if doing this show again is some joke and he knows the punchline. Scully, forever the straight one in the pair, is overly collagened and unable to deliver on the promise of a long-coming emotional teardown. This show is not what it once was or could have been. It feels contrived, rushed, and very limited. Ultimately, it was a disappointment.

On the road to disappointment I came to a crossroads. At that place I met the devil. He was charming and interesting and well cast and brought a frenetic energy to a show and a script that was not much better than the X-Files. Two stories in one night that failed to meet my low expectations.

Such is the way of Fox. At least they still have new girl.