travistragic
Occasional Pre-Show
I've heard that the past few TNA Impact's have only had about 15-16 minutes of actual wrestling. On one hand, this kind of works out for me as I record Impact on Saturday morning (Too much to record on Thursday night, oh well) and I think it's kind of great that I can knock out a good 2% off my recording space in roughly 20 minutes every Sunday. On the other hand, I wonder, (insert IMO here) with all of the better talent and better matches that TNA puts on, why I only get fifteen minutes of TNA wrestling a week?
I usually watch Raw semi-live with my best friend (we start a half hour late to skip through talk-talk and commercials) and struggle to keep myself awake through all of the blah-blah-blah to watch the actual matches, which generally, at least in comparison to Smackdown and Impact, aren't worth my trouble anyway.
I'm starting to think, as a wrestling fan, where's the beef? Maybe it isn't a new thing, maybe it's something I'm just starting to notice recently, but with two hours of RAW, two hours of Smackdown, one hour of ECW, one hour of Superstars, and two hours of Impact for a total of 8 hours of wrestling, why do I still feel short-changed on the amount of wrestling provided every week?
TNA is the worst offender, with the amount of talent they have they provide us with four matches a week and the sad thing is that, since I skip anything with Samoa Joe or an MEMer, one of the best three matches from TNA on any given week is usually a Knockout match (granted their women can actually wrestle, especially with the addition of Tara, but I never got into wrestling to watch pretty girls except for the perchance of a nipple slip).
But RAW is just as unbearable because, after we get done with all of the Legacy, Cena, or whoever vignettes, the wrestling matches they do afford us are short and usually terrible. RAW matches go either one way or the other, either they do nothing to further a storyline, or the pursuance of a storyline makes the match worthless; they seem almost incapable, especially in the main event, to attempt to both put on a good match AND add depth to a storyline at the same time. And the rest of the time is talk and talk and talk. I think at this point, Cena never has to have a promo ever again. Anyone who is going to like him already does, and those who don't will like him even less the more he's on the mic. It's a pointless waste of time. You can say the same thing on the vice versa end about Orton. Anyone who isn't going to like him already doesn't, and the more you put him on the mic, the more people who like him will continue to like him. Neither are like Jericho who can constantly bring something fresh to the mic, can piss off people in new ways every night, they just issue the same cheap pops/heat and waste time you could be using to have a match-up. I see HHH is back and all I can think of is "great, another person to sit on the mic and eat up TV time."
Smackdown seems to have a pretty good balance of wrestling and vignettes, but they also, so far, waste plenty of time going over the shit we didn't want to watch the first time it happened on RAW.
Long story short, to me it seems, if I want to watch a sport, I'll watch a game, if I want talk-talk, I'll put on SportsCenter. Why don't we have a choice for wrestling? I want to hear what you think. Do you like all the talk-talk? Are storylines, as slow and vapid as they get at times, more important to you than the actual meat-and-potatoes, men in tights throwing Irish whips? Do you think this is some maneuver on the big companies' parts to get us to buy the PPVs when we want to actually watch matches directly followed by more matches?
Commercial-free RAW? I say fuck that, keep the commercials, take out the talk-talk.
I usually watch Raw semi-live with my best friend (we start a half hour late to skip through talk-talk and commercials) and struggle to keep myself awake through all of the blah-blah-blah to watch the actual matches, which generally, at least in comparison to Smackdown and Impact, aren't worth my trouble anyway.
I'm starting to think, as a wrestling fan, where's the beef? Maybe it isn't a new thing, maybe it's something I'm just starting to notice recently, but with two hours of RAW, two hours of Smackdown, one hour of ECW, one hour of Superstars, and two hours of Impact for a total of 8 hours of wrestling, why do I still feel short-changed on the amount of wrestling provided every week?
TNA is the worst offender, with the amount of talent they have they provide us with four matches a week and the sad thing is that, since I skip anything with Samoa Joe or an MEMer, one of the best three matches from TNA on any given week is usually a Knockout match (granted their women can actually wrestle, especially with the addition of Tara, but I never got into wrestling to watch pretty girls except for the perchance of a nipple slip).
But RAW is just as unbearable because, after we get done with all of the Legacy, Cena, or whoever vignettes, the wrestling matches they do afford us are short and usually terrible. RAW matches go either one way or the other, either they do nothing to further a storyline, or the pursuance of a storyline makes the match worthless; they seem almost incapable, especially in the main event, to attempt to both put on a good match AND add depth to a storyline at the same time. And the rest of the time is talk and talk and talk. I think at this point, Cena never has to have a promo ever again. Anyone who is going to like him already does, and those who don't will like him even less the more he's on the mic. It's a pointless waste of time. You can say the same thing on the vice versa end about Orton. Anyone who isn't going to like him already doesn't, and the more you put him on the mic, the more people who like him will continue to like him. Neither are like Jericho who can constantly bring something fresh to the mic, can piss off people in new ways every night, they just issue the same cheap pops/heat and waste time you could be using to have a match-up. I see HHH is back and all I can think of is "great, another person to sit on the mic and eat up TV time."
Smackdown seems to have a pretty good balance of wrestling and vignettes, but they also, so far, waste plenty of time going over the shit we didn't want to watch the first time it happened on RAW.
Long story short, to me it seems, if I want to watch a sport, I'll watch a game, if I want talk-talk, I'll put on SportsCenter. Why don't we have a choice for wrestling? I want to hear what you think. Do you like all the talk-talk? Are storylines, as slow and vapid as they get at times, more important to you than the actual meat-and-potatoes, men in tights throwing Irish whips? Do you think this is some maneuver on the big companies' parts to get us to buy the PPVs when we want to actually watch matches directly followed by more matches?
Commercial-free RAW? I say fuck that, keep the commercials, take out the talk-talk.
