WWE News: Monday Night Raw Named Wresting Observer's 'Worst Television Show' for 2016

What’s the story?

In their annual vote, subscribers of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter have voted WWE’s flagship show, Monday Night Raw, to as the worst wrestling television show of 2016.

In case you didn’t know...

The Wrestling Observer and its fans rate more than just wrestlers and their matches. Entire shows, special events and promotions are also critiqued on a regular basis by Dave Meltzer and his Observer. WWE is no exception to this rule, being the frequent target of critiques and sometimes more severe criticism for various creative and business decisions.

As the name implies, the award for ‘Worst Television Show’ goes to the weekly wrestling program that has the most flaws or does the least to attract new and regular viewers to tune in.

The heart of the matter

Unlike other categories, which had ten entries competing for the top spot, this one only had three:

1. WWE Raw 3082. TNA Impact 1653. Lucha Underground 107

Raw received almost double the number of votes TNA Impact received, which is a damning indictment of WWE’s flagship show.

What’s next?

Despite this ‘distinguished’ award, nothing is likely to change with Monday Night Raw. It’s still Vince’s flagship show, the one he considers his most important regular program. No matter how much criticism gets directed towards the overall structure of the show, Vince is likely to keep booking the show in the same way it has been booked for the past five years.

Sportskeeda’s take

Raw absolutely deserved to be given this award. One doesn’t have to wait long every week before there’s something irritating, boring, or illogical being booked on Raw. There are plenty of problems with the show in terms of storylines presented and overall execution (just look at my weekly Rants on the show; I only do those because WWE gives me plenty of material to work with), but the show suffers from three key problems:

#1 Length: Raw is 3 hours long, which is far longer than any good wrestling show should be. It’s tiring for average fans to spend 3 hours on Monday nights watching wrestling, especially since their younger demographics probably don’t stay up past 10 pm anyway.

#2 An overemphasis on Authority figures: Almost every week, the star of the show appears to be Stephanie McMahon. Her character’s booked as the untouchable boss that never gets her comeuppance, which has led some people to consider her to be the biggest star of the show. This is in stark contrast with Daniel Bryan, who acts as a regular on-screen authority character but doesn’t have the show revolving around him.

#3 Filler matches and repetition: Despite being three hours long, it’s rare that Raw ever features more than one meaningful match or segment. Unless you’re in the main event or named Roman Reigns, you’re likely to spend each live Raw in a random tag team match that doesn’t mean anything that’ll likely be repeated in a different town two weeks afterwards. Because the show features such lazily-organized matches, the fans don't care about the wrestlers on the show, which causes the audience to react less and less when they see certain wrestlers.

While Raw does deserve this award, it really shouldn’t be this bad. Fans like myself that criticise Raw on a regular basis do so because we want the show to be better. That doesn’t mean we want it to go back to the high-risk sleaze of the Attitude Era or bring back chair shots to the head. All we want to see are wrestling storylines that make sense from a logical perspective. SmackDown appears to do this correctly and more often, so why is it so hard for Raw to do the same?

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