RAW and Impact from last Monday Night aka Wrestling is Dead

This past Monday night saw the 'revival' of the period of time referred to in wrestling circles as the Monday Night Wars. The period from 1995 to 2001 saw two competing wrestling programmes on at roughly the same time on Monday night, both fighting for the same viewers. Ratings were through the roof for both shows. This period of time ended with the ending of one programme and the subsequent closing down of one of the promotions. It could easily be argued that wrestling has not been the same since. It has been less interesting, less creative, less watched. This past Monday saw a company, TNA wrestling, the spiritual successor to the cancelled WCW, run a special show up against the WWE's long time Monday night show RAW. TNA was celebrating the fact that Hulk Hogan was showing up in their promotion and 'pulled out all the stops' to make it a special show. This was to compete with the fact that Bret Hart, long estranged from WWE owner Vince McMahon and WWE star Shawn Michaels, would be guest hosting on RAW. I DVRed both shows with the intent of watching, or at least skimming, through both on Tuesday and reviewing them. Instead I watched bits and pieces of both shows, mostly TNA's Impact show, on Monday night.

I have yet to go back and watch either show.

What I saw of RAW was the same old show that I stopped enjoying and watching a few years ago. While I give them credit for not acknowledging their competition by bothering to do anything more special than Bret Hart, there was still nothing out there for me to care about. The incident that caused the conflict with Bret Hart was a little over twelve years ago. Is it nice to have him 'back', even though the man can't wrestling anymore? Sure, I guess but the WWE has been aiming their programming primary at a younger audience again. Most of the fan base they are aiming at weren't alive when this happened! So, whatever.

Impact was a train wreck. Poor storytelling, random cameos by wrestlers, dumb ideas, poorly developed ideas and, apart from the main event, poor displays of wrestling. It was like an episode of WCW's Nitro from near the end of the run when the promotion was desperate for something to stick, desperate to find a direction and willing to try anything until they found something that worked. It was entertainingly bad but otherwise just bad.

There was nothing in either show that made me want to watch another episode. For that matter, there was nothing in either show that made me want to watch the full episode! As a result, I consider them both failures.

That doesn't mean I didn't learn something from the shows.

For more than a year now, I've been working on a short story collection featuring my character El Hombre de Silla. He is a wrestler that also gets involved in different adventures. While there are wrestling related storylines in some of the stories, he's not constantly in the ring. After 'watching' the shows on Monday it occurred to me that by writing was filling most of my 'need' for wrestling, in a way similar to the 'Doctor Who' fan fiction I'd written when the show was off the air in the 1990s. Rather than suffer through something I wasn't enjoying, I was creating something I was enjoying, with the hope at the end that others will enjoy it as well.

In the end, it wasn't a completely wasted Monday night afterall.