Steve Carrier on December 13, 2017
Russo is joined on today’s show by his co-host Jeff Lane.
Russo informs that he worked on the debut Aro Lucha show this past weekend and he calls it the greatest experience he’s had in the wrestling business. He hates having to leave his house to travel for wrestling shows or conventions, but this show didn’t feel like work to him for one minute.
By all accounts everyone who attended this show had a great time and the reviews online have been great. Unfortunately some dirt sheet writers still had some criticisms, and Russo simply doesn’t understand why they’d want to tear down the show after the promoters spent a lot of time and effort guaranteeing that their debut show would be a hit.
Lane assumes that these dirt sheet writers criticized the show because Russo was involved and these people love to bash anything that Russo’s involved with. Russo admits that this might be true but if it is, that’s a very sad situation.
Moving into his thoughts about this week’s episodes of RAW and Smackdown Live, Russo says that WWE’s two flagship shows have basically become televised house shows at this point. Lane agrees and thinks that the last three weeks of programming have been particularly poor.
Russo mentions that some dirt sheet writers appeared to like Samoa Joe’s opening promo on RAW but he and Lane thought it was “long and boring”. He also says that Seth Rollins’ punches are embarrassing most of the time, and that’s just unacceptable from someone who’s widely considered to be one of the best workers in the world.
Russo hated that only a couple of weeks after Absolution’s debut, their heat was completely swept away by having the entire RAW roster beat them up and embarrass them this week. He adds that the Riott Squad suffered a similar fate on Smackdown Live this week, and he thinks that’s simply terrible writing on both shows.
Russo loved the debut of “Woken” Matt Hardy two weeks ago, but he hated that WWE failed to advance the storyline this week. They simply shot the exact same promo segment for the second week in a row, and this doesn’t give Russo much hope that WWE will ever figure out how to write effectively for the “Woken” Hardy character.
He mentions that the Kane/Braun Strowman storyline is a complete waste of time because we all know who’s going to emerge victorious in the end. Lane mentions that predictability has been a problem in a lot of WWE’s matches lately. On this episode of RAW for example, we all knew Reigns was going to be Cesaro and Finn Balor was going to beat Curtis Axel.
Moving over to Smackdown Live, Russo says that the only way the Daniel Bryan/Shane McMahon storyline will work is if WWE allows Bryan to talk about the real life struggle of trying to get WWE to clear him for an in-ring return. He knows that WWE doesn’t have the balls to do that and if that’s not where they’re heading, this entire angle is just terrible television in his opinion.
During the main event of the show Sami Zayn was actually beating up Randy Orton on the outside of the ring at one point. Russo thought this beatdown was completely unbelievable because anyone who sees Zayn stand next to Orton knows that Zayn could never get the upper hand on Orton in a physical dispute.
Russo mentions that the only thing that will make him watch Clash of Champions this Sunday is if Kevin Owens and Sami Zayn lose so he never has to see them on Smackdown Live again. In all seriousness, he doesn’t want to see anyone lose their job, but if he was booking he’d book them to lose on Sunday and then he’d move them to NXT where they can basically run that brand.
That sums up today’s episode of Vince Russo’s The Brand. You can listen to the show yourself anytime here, and I’ll catch ya tomorrow for another recap!
December 13, 2017 11:13 pm
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