Taz says that last night’s episode of Monday Night RAW was an up and down show in his opinion. The show lost his attention for a considerable amount of time through the middle of the broadcast, but once “Woken” Matt Hardy arrived, business picked up big time in Taz’s opinion.
He thinks that Vince McMahon probably loved the “Woken” character that debuted on RAW last night. Taz points out that Vince McMahon doesn’t watch television, and any spare time he has he likes to read. For this reason, Taz doubts that McMahon watched much of “Broken” Hardy’s work in TNA but he’s sure McMahon knew that something cool was happening.
Now that Hardy and WWE have finally embraced this character on RAW, their flagship show, Taz thinks McMahon is going to fall in love with this character. Hardy utilizes a lot of fairly advanced vocabulary during his promos with this character and Taz knows how much McMahon loves vocabulary. He thinks this character is going to work well in WWE moving forward as long as McMahon and WWE listens to Hardy, and lets him have some creative freedom with this character.
Taz adds that he’s very happy for Hardy right now. Hardy had a vision over two years ago in TNA and after developing this amazing character, he was able to captivate the audience and bring attention to a stumbling TNA promotion. After months of battling over the rights to the character with Anthem, Hardy finally has an opportunity to bring his imagination to the big leagues on RAW.
The only thing that Taz thought WWE missed the mark on in this segment was the lighting with which they shot Hardy backstage. Taz thought that Hardy needed to be shot with a grainier, filtered lighting during this promo, or perhaps this should have been shot in an outside location to fully embrace the silliness and craziness of this character. Nonetheless, Taz knows that this is nitpicking and he loved this segment overall.
Bouncing back to the beginning of the show, Taz didn’t have a problem with the opening promo segment featuring Kurt Angle, Roman Reigns, Jason Jordan and Samoa Joe. He points out that WWE opens RAW seemingly every single week with a promo segment and this is so that they can set up what’s going to be happening throughout the rest of the show, but sometimes he’d like to see RAW open with an actual match.
Taz discusses WWE Network’s newest original series, “Straight to the Source”. He points out that this show is a great idea for WWE because it’s basically free for them to produce. They created a cool logo and gave Corey Graves another project to work on, but having Graves interview one of their talents before a television taping is basically free for the company from a production standpoint, and he’s sure that’s why WWE developed this series.
Taz really enjoyed Paige’s return to the ring last night against Sasha Banks. He thought that both of these women delivered big time, and he actually thought that this match should have been the main event of the show. He says it’s great to see Paige back where she belongs, competing in a WWE ring, and she hasn’t missed a beat in his opinion.
He mentions that the Cruiserweights really turned up the heat during their Fatal 4-way match last night. He was very impressed by some of the high spots that those guys executed in that match, but he thought some of the simpler physicality like punches and kicks could have been improved by a couple of the competitors.
Taz liked the creative finish to the Tag Team Championship main event match between Sheamus/Cesaro & Rollins/Ambrose. He points out that after Angle came out and announced that the match would be restarting as a DQ match, the groundwork was laid for Rollins & Ambrose to win the Titles. However, WWE swerved us again and after Reigns and Samoa Joe got involved, the heels snuck away with their Titles against all odds.
That sums up today’s episode of The Taz Show. You can listen to the show yourself anytime here, and I’ll catch ya tomorrow for another recap!
