How would you present Raw?

[Accident Prone]

11 minutes ago, tiger_rick said:

3 hours clearly is a problem but that's what the discussion is about. How to present Raw - which is 3 hours.

I know, that's my point. With their massive team and seemingly unlimited resources, they should clobbering together three hour shows that aren't boring, frustrating and mind-mindbogglingly alien with relative ease. It's honestly baffling to me. I'd give the show an immediate 2nd chance if even three of the ideas presented by you or @BomberPat suggested are rolled out.

[The Maestro]

If someone is organically getting over with the crowd, push them. This doesn't mean strapping a rocket to their back but take advantage of that wrestler's popularity, however fleeting it may be. There seems to have been so many times were the crowd were responding to a particular wrestler only for them to get a boost when the audience has cooled on them. Strike whilst the iron is hot and see where it goes.

[AdamTH17]

My biggest issue with modern-day WWE is how everyone is equal. I’m not talking in terms of the 50/50 booking that’s plagued them for years, I’m talking about how when in a match, every competitor is as good as one another, barring the squash matches from local competitors.

Wrestlers should be befitting of their kayfabe “power levels”. A big reason why there are no full-time stars is because everyone wrestles in the exact same fashion, in the exact same match. Guys near the main event should not be going 50/50 with opening geeks, and this happens every single RAW and Smackdown. Even the PPV’s to me are nearly unwatchable at the moment, because every match with the exception of Brock/Ronda are two wrestlers fighting each other who are exactly as good as the other. 

It doesn’t make anyone look good when it becomes the only formula and structure for a match. Having a lower-carder be on an equal wavelength with somebody above them in the hierarchy should feel like a big moment that escalates their push, and instead it feels the complete opposite because it’s happening every single week.

[DCW]

Get rid of the three man announce team, two dour cunts repeating Vince's insane vocabulary rules and non catchy catchphrases is enough. 

Change up the set, theme, entrance videos,  backstage areas, and camera angles from time to time.

No more abrasive authority figures. Just have a neutral lad who announces matches every week and doesn't get involved feuding with wrestlers. The authority figure is such lazy fucking booking. I have no idea why that insufferable Corbin twat is called a constable now, and have no desire to find out why. It's just pure laziness on WWE's part.

Never have Steph on TV again, she is poison. Triple H can come back at Mania time and  once every year or so to make a big announcement.

Way shorter matches, replaced with vignettes of wrestlers away from the ring and arena. Why is Sasha Banks called boss? why does Finn Balor wear the mad face paint? why is Ambrose a lunatic? where does Rousey get her crap haircuts and make up done? flesh out that sort of stuff.

[Briefcase]

Bring back Pyros at the start of the show. I always thought this at the very least gets the fans into the show but was always a great visual/sound. 

I don't think there are pyros of any type these days other than at WrestleMania. Even the part at the start of Raw where the cameras focuses on the fans is filmed before Raw goes live. Probably so WWE can cherry pick which attention seeking fan to zoom in on.

[Supremo]

Some cracking stuff in this thread already. Most of what I'd suggest has already been brought up.

Vignettes is the biggest one for me. It does my head in that everyone gets the standard three or four weeks of vignettes to set their character up before they debut, but then that's it. After that they just have dead long matches every week until the end of time. Adam Rose should've been hosting big parties backstage, or been getting thrown out of night clubs. Tyler Breeze should be having his modelling career sabotaged somehow by his current rival. Chad Gable should be showing up at Bobby Roode's house and annoying him by trying on his robes or ruining his gym workout by constantly shouting, "Glorious!" after every rep. The B Team, as shit as they were, when they were on that silly winning streak they should've been shown going out on a massive bender, hanging out of a limousine sunroof, ending up having to phone Kurt Angle to bail them out because they got arrested. Elias should be out on the street criticising buskers, or should be shown in the studio getting attacked by a rival, or shown hosting an album launch with a red carpet event. I dunno, just anything other than the same guys doing the same one note thing in the ring before having yet another long match. How many weeks can someone realistically interrupt Elias, then have a match with him? It feels like that's happened every week for about six months now.

Working nights, I'm often able to watch Raw live and there comes a point on every episode, somewhere around the two hour and fifteen minute mark, where you can't believe the show is still going on. It's usually around this time when they send out someone like Mojo or Jinder, too. Christ. I've already seen about ten matches and there's probably another three to go, and now you're sending out the people nobody on the planet could possibly care about? It's at that time that I always end up thinking about those Jim Ross interviews from 1997 with Goldust and Mankind. The time wasted putting someone like Mojo in the ring, you could sit him backstage and do something similar to those segments. Have Renee interview him and flesh his character out a bit. Make me care about these people.

I know it's not as cool anymore to quote Max Landis, since he eventually got outed as a sexual misconduct baddo, but I always loved his analogy of WWE Raw and The Muppet Show being similarly formatted. He likened them in the sense that The Muppet Show works on two levels. Whilst they have the skits and the song and dance numbers, beyond that you get all the mayhem backstage as things keep going wrong and you see all the bedlam of them trying to run the show. Raw at its best works the same. On the surface, it's supposed to be about guys just having matches to determine who the best wrestler is, but the joy comes from all the stupid stuff that happens backstage. Guys are attacked and thrown into swimming pools, someone ends up shagging another wrestler's wife, etc. The reason Raw feels so shit these days is because, somewhere along the way, they forgot this and, for the most part, just made it a show that features loads of matches.

Another thing I'd like to see more of are those self-contained storylines that last the entire episode. They did it the other week when The Shield were arrested and sent to jail only to return in the final segment. They need to do loads more of that. Give me a reason to keep watching. Make me care about sticking around to the end. It's not enough to just announce a main event match. All the show is these days is endless matches, so just another match, even if it features the biggest stars, no longer has the novelty to keep me interested. Cliffhangers and storylines that develop over multiple episodes wouldn't be a bad thing, either. We've seen it on Smackers recently so there's no reason why they shouldn't be able to do it on Raw. If anything, the extra time they have on Mondays should give them more breathing room to come up with stuff.

Finally, it's a minor thing but something I'm obsessed with - allow people to dress differently each week. Maybe it's worse because I followed her entire MMA career but the way Ronda is presented is so fucking weird. She was a normal person who'd dressed differently at every appearance, then she comes to WWE and is boiled down to one note like everyone else. Always in the exact same T-shirt and jeans, not only does it make her seem like an android, it also adds to the sense of staleness. Honestly, the best time of Dave Batista's career was that heel run where he'd wear more and more preposterous outfits each week. I want more of that.

 

[CavemanLynn]

Agreed on nearly everything so far. You basically need Attitude Era presentation with modern content and without the EXTREME!!11!! dross.

No more wrestling moves in Titantrons. Get the character over, then let the worker cover the moves. I miss iconic vids like DX's fast cut MTV tron, Edge running around in the dark, Rock's Hollywood skyline, etc. Val Venis standing up in the bushes in a purple fishing hat.

Stop treating the live show and TV viewer as the same thing. While the TV viewers watch a 15 minute mini doc getting to know a main roster star or checking in on an injured one's rehab, chuck a quick match out for the lives to keep them sweet. That's where you're gimmick performers need to be.

In fact, more gimmick performers. Open the show with a hype match. No one expected solid gold out of the Godfather but you loved his theme, sang along with his promo (even if you didn't REALLY get it!), and got a kick out of his victory dance with the Hos. Guys like Tye Dillinger and the Fashion Police should be killing it in this spot.

More promos to the crowd not the camera.

Smaller entrance set. It'll make for more visual variety, and actually make the wrestlers look more impressive. They're swamped in LEDs and look smaller for it.

[Onyx2]

6 minutes ago, Supremo said:

The time wasted putting someone like Mojo in the ring, you could sit him backstage and do something similar to those segments. Have Renee interview him and flesh his character out a bit. Make me care about these people.

"But we tried that, and you hated it!" says Vince.

I'm being facetious.Interviews and backstagey bits, just like when Raw was snowed in, would be perfect padding between matches to let them breathe. They're so desperate in matches to allow moves to have impact, so why not let whole matches have impact.

[Supremo]

Fucking hell. I'd forgotten about that interview. Thank fuck they brought in Leo Rush. Lashley should never cut a promo again. At least not as a babyface. He's so creepy and haunting. Look at those eyes! And that grin! Check that man's hard drive.

That's a point, actually. They need to completely overhaul how they write. I'm not even talking in that mid-2000, "the Hollywood writers suck! bring back Jim Cornette!" sense. It's more in the weird, creepy, snide way that they script babyfaces and the way in which all promos and interviews nowadays are centered around guys sniping at each other, like someone has watched too many Rap Battles or spent way too long reading shitty message boards online. Nobody gets angry or argues or talks about their goals or what they plan to do their opponents or whatever. Everything is completely geared towards, "dropping," these one-liners that are supposed to be mic-drop moments where the crowd go, "oooooh!" At best, even when they land well, it still makes the guy delivering it come across as a dickhead. Never mind the fact that nine times out of ten they're met with awkward silence from the crowd. Roman is the worst example. Everything he says has this crap shooty element to it, where he tried to, "own," his opponent with terrible putdowns that don't really work and make him seem insanely unlikable.

 

 

[King Pitcos]

Loads of stuff I agree with posted, particularly more backstage/out of arena skits, and fewer and shorter matches. Definitely agree with the point about how dull it is that everyone seems on the same level. Roman Reigns is meant to be the top man, but put him against almost anyone on the roster and they're probably gonna go fifteen minutes of near falls. Pick your top guys and protect them - have them destroy most of the lower carders in a couple of minutes, and make a big deal of it when a Mojo or Tyler Breeze or Chad Gable or whoever gets a competitive match out of them. I'd keep them away from each other most of the time as well. Dolph Ziggler hasn't really changed anything since he was a lowercard loser, he's not had a memorable winning streak, but we're meant to accept that he's one of the top heels on the show now just because he's in those segments. 

Raw needs four main event segments every week. The roster just isn't deep enough to do that with matches. Have one of them be a match, and the other three be big promos or some wacky wrestling storyline bullshit that continues through the episode. Like when the Corporation (or whatever authority faction it was) were pooing their pants at opening a door and seeing a cardboard cut-out of Austin, leading to some big in-ring segment where they have a showdown.

I'd just like to see everyone fucking about and having fun more, like they did on Talking Smack or on the YouTube videos and whatnot. But then, I'm a jaded longtime fan, and to a kid just watching, the wrestlers messing around might be disappointing.

[Onyx2]

3 minutes ago, King Pitcos said:

Pick your top guys and protect them - have them destroy most of the lower carders in a couple of minutes, and make a big deal of it when a Mojo or Tyler Breeze or Chad Gable or whoever gets a competitive match out of them.

Remember when they had a lottery on SmackDown in 2000 when Triple H was champ, and Rikishi was drawn to have a title match? It really felt like Rikishi was two or three tiers under Triple H, then came off brilliant when he had a really even match with him.

[King Pitcos]

Triple H did that a few times in that era - there's the famous one with TAKA as well, and I remember one with Hardcore Holly on Heat, and there were probably a couple more. It was done sparingly enough that it never got old. Course, it's almost twenty years ago now and the shows haven't evolved much, so it's hard to make it novel these days. Even if they implemented a lot of the ideas from this thread, we'd be less bored, but I don't think we'd fully engage with the storylines. I think wrestling being red hot at the time (and so much of the roster being so over) helped, as did Rock being up for giving stuff a go. There were so many shows where the heel authority faction would just chuck fairly random shite out as a main event - The Rock vs the Dudley Boyz in a tables match, or The Rock vs Right to Censor in a handicap match. The sort of stuff that if they'd suggested it with Austin the year before, he'd have told them to fuck off and he was gonna just do a promo and hit everyone with a chair.

[HarmonicGenerator]

3 hours ago, AdamTH17 said:

My biggest issue with modern-day WWE is how everyone is equal. I’m not talking in terms of the 50/50 booking that’s plagued them for years, I’m talking about how when in a match, every competitor is as good as one another, barring the squash matches from local competitors.

Wrestlers should be befitting of their kayfabe “power levels”. A big reason why there are no full-time stars is because everyone wrestles in the exact same fashion, in the exact same match. Guys near the main event should not be going 50/50 with opening geeks, and this happens every single RAW and Smackdown. Even the PPV’s to me are nearly unwatchable at the moment, because every match with the exception of Brock/Ronda are two wrestlers fighting each other who are exactly as good as the other. 

It doesn’t make anyone look good when it becomes the only formula and structure for a match. Having a lower-carder be on an equal wavelength with somebody above them in the hierarchy should feel like a big moment that escalates their push, and instead it feels the complete opposite because it’s happening every single week.

I’d never really thought about this, but you’re exactly right. This is a major problem for me and I didn’t even know it until today!

[Fatty Facesitter]

Death. To. Rematches. 

The first addition I'd make is having more consistent themes running the length of an episode. Last week was actually a great example - Dean Ambrose was the catalyst and the majority of the show revolved around his inner turmoil. He was clearly struggling with how the heels' words had resonated with him and how they might have been truer than he'd care to admit. They went backstage during the show with a couple of different segments and it continued to play out post-event. It could play out for a few more weeks.

This was a staple Raw in it's heydey, but even without that comparison it's one of the single, most basic of functions of any TV show going. The announcers constantly mentioned it throughout - not overtly as to take away from other matches they were calling - but just enough to keep planting the reminders in your head. More, more, MORE of this. It doesn't even have to be for anything more than several people coming forward and staking a claim for the Universal title - the simplicity of creating a new #1 contender to the strap is an easy, believable focus for the show.

Tying in directly with the above - more themed episodes. One of my favourite themes from past Raws are the Raw Roulettes they used to do in Vegas. Although a bit cheesy in some respects, it forced them to create real variety by default. You had comedy stipulations from people like Regal and Goldust, mixed in with a bit of brutality from something like a hardcore match/cage match, etc. Old School Raw is another great example - that should have always been a yearly thing. You can expand on it even further with stuff like an Attitude Era Raw or something along those lines. Another simple, yet easy to execute favourite of mine is whenever they have a Beat The Clock challenge. The first match sets the tone for the rest of the night and it creates real drama and tension as the clock ticks down with each of the other bouts as they look to beat the previous time set. You could get six matches out of that easily if you're worried about filling up the three hours. Appreciate it's hard coming up with 52 different scenarios like that and you can't necessarily do it every week, but the more of these you have which can be billed as annual events, the stronger the show becomes as a result. 

[King Pitcos]

11 minutes ago, Fatty Facesitter said:

Tying in directly with the above - more themed episodes. One of my favourite themes from past Raws are the Raw Roulettes they used to do in Vegas. Although a bit cheesy in some respects, it forced them to create real variety by default. You had comedy stipulations from people like Regal and Goldust, mixed in with a bit of brutality from something like a hardcore match/cage match, etc. Old School Raw is another great example - that should have always been a yearly thing. You can expand on it even further with stuff like an Attitude Era Raw or something along those lines. Another simple, yet easy to execute favourite of mine is whenever they have a Beat The Clock challenge. The first match sets the tone for the rest of the night and it creates real drama and tension as the clock ticks down with each of the other bouts as they look to beat the previous time set. You could get six matches out of that easily if you're worried about filling up the three hours. Appreciate it's hard coming up with 52 different scenarios like that and you can't necessarily do it every week, but the more of these you have which can be billed as annual events, the stronger the show becomes as a result. 

I like this idea. I don't know how often it can be done, but it's definitely worth a go. King of the Ring has never been much cop when they've done it as a Raw, but it could be a good idea. They can do a Beat the Clock once or twice a year as well, and a gauntlet like they did earlier this year when Rollins beat Reigns and Cena one after the other. There are various things like that they could come up with - something like opening the show with a battle royal for an IC or Universal title match that's only open to wrestlers who've never held the title, and the title shot being the main event. A twist on that WCW odd couple tag team tournament thing, where the winning team will be put in a triple threat match with the champ at the next PPV.

There's some overlap in the following, but yeah, things like Old School Raw and Attitude Raw always add some intrigue - they could go one further and do things like Raw is Jericho, where Y2J comes back as the authority figure for the night. Similar thing with Stone Cold Raw and so on.