#2 Promo Quality: Winner – SmackDown
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When it came to the ‘This is your life’ segment, perhaps it’s best to place this under the ‘at least they tried’ file. But Alexa Bliss’s promo segment was relevant to the match on Sunday. The story they are currently going with here is that Bayley might not have it in her to ‘get extreme’. Alexa, therefore, portrayed Bayley as an innocent daddy’s girl, talking to people from her past who were able to clarify as much.
The content might have been a little cringeworthy, and it’s never good when the crowd start shouting ‘boring’, but I think it’s to Alexa’s credit that she kept her composure and made it through to the end without too much trouble. Anyone who is criticising this segment too harshly needs to remember that anything lasting five minutes is better than we usually get from the women’s division when it comes to promos.
This was a week in which Raw relied more on the wrestling than promo work, which is strange considering this is the go home show for Extreme Rules. I would have preferred at least one talking segment where all five competitors for Sunday’s main event were in the ring at the same time, and we also didn’t really get much dialogue between The Miz and Ambrose on Miz TV. Go home shows are traditionally more about building up the suspense on the microphone than giving away too much of the PPV action for free.
SmackDown, on the other hand, did a much better job of building up their Money in the Bank PPV, despite it still being three weeks away. The show started with Kevin Owens’ Highlight Reel, which is a nice placeholder for them until Jericho comes back. Kevin is one of the company’s best talkers right now, and it is good for him to have his own show like this. He managed to keep the opening segment entertaining despite having two much weaker talkers in the ring with him.
The highlight probably came during the New Day and Usos segment. The Usos are showing a side to them we always knew they had right. All it took was a strategic heel turn for the brothers to showcase their real talking talents. The New Day are all very accomplished in that area in their own rights, especially Xavier Woods. I'm looking forward to seeing more promo segments between these two teams in the next few weeks.
Randy Orton also delivered a response to Jinder Mahal after losing his WWE Championship at Backlash. It was a typical Orton promo, nothing special but very to the point. Randy isn’t someone who can show much diversity with his mic skills which let the second half of the show down a little, but at least it was short.
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