Since I’ve been away for the last couple of weeks and haven’t seen any of the build-up, this may be a relatively concise rundown.  We’ll see.

Summerslam is traditionally the WWE’s major PPV of the summer.  In fact, there’s not much on this card that looks particularly extraordinary.  In one case, that’s probably because planned celebrity involvement fell through.  Otherwise, it’s something of a business-as-usual card – though one unusually light on gimmick matches.

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Once again, the WWE has chosen to make this easy for me by only announcing five matches – one of which is going to be the pre-show match, streaming on YouTube.  So in practice, that’s only four matches announced for a three-hour show.

Now, granted, in practice, all four matches can be expected to be lengthy – but that’s still about an hour of mystery content for the PPV buyer.  There’s a school of thought that says this doesn’t matter.  In one sense that’s correct.  Nobody (or nobody who understands how these shows work, at any rate) ever bought a three-hour show because of the sixth match on the card, which was unlikely to run more than ten minutes.

But I still think it’s a mistake, for two reasons.

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Another pay per view this weekend, and there’s a bit of filler going on here.  Injuries and suspensions have led to a bit of reshuffling of this card, and there’s also a main event match that looks sure to under deliver.

No Way Out is a name that hasn’t been used since 2009, but it’s basically just one of the generic B-list pay per views that has no particular gimmick.  There was some talk at one point that this was going to be a cage match show, which would have fitted with the name.  But it turns out there’s just one cage match.  In practice, it’s simply a generic PPV.  (In Germany, by the way, it’s called No Escape.  That’s because they already used the name No Way Out in February when the Germans flatly refused to promote a show called Elimination Chamber.)

So… the card.

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Over the Limit is one of those generic pay-per-views that clogs up the annual schedule and that the company could probably quite happily do without.  After the brief excitement of Brock Lesnar’s appearance last month, he’s been put on the back burner until Summerslam (in two shows time), so for the moment, we’re firmly in the annual post-Wrestlemania lull when not a great deal is happening.  And it shows from the card, which is a mixture of essentially random pairings that might make for good matches, plus a storyline-driven main event that would probably have been better off on free television.

Before turning to the card, let’s quickly reflect on the latest overhaul of the company’s filming schedule.  For some time now, the WWE shooting schedule has basically consisted of tapings on Monday and Tuesday, with an extra Sunday pay-per-view show every three to four weeks.  The Monday taping consists of the live two-hour Raw broadcast together with some matches used for the internationally syndicated show Superstars; Tuesday generally records the two-hour Smackdown for broadcast on Friday, another Superstars match, and the dreaded NXT, featuring a mix of rookie and low-end roster members.  The problem with NXT is that it’s not broadcast in the US (you can watch it online but almost nobody does), meaning that each show is taped before an utterly indifferent crowd who don’t recognise anyone.

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And normal service is resumed with the post that a small minority of you were waiting for – a preview of WWE Extreme Rules!  This, to be honest, is a show I won’t be ordering because I won’t have time to watch it in the next few days – but it’s also an unusually newsworthy B-show, built around the return of Brock Lesnar after eight years.

Extreme Rules started life as a successor to the WWE’s successful ECW reunion pay-per-views which paid tribute to the influential 90s promotion.  After the WWE revived the ECW brand for a short-lived and entirely unsuccessful weekly show, their annual PPV was rebranded under the current name, and basically ended up as a show full of gimmick matches.  “Extreme Rules” used to be the WWE’s preferred term for ECW rules (i.e., no count-outs and no disqualification), but for the purposes of this year’s show, it seems that pretty much any gimmick is deemed acceptable – there’s nothing especially “extreme” about a best-of-three-falls match, but they’re doing one anyway.  Mind you, it’s not as if wrestling referees are exactly noted for their rigorous enforcement of the rules in the first place.

This year, Extreme Rules also follows Wrestlemania in the PPV calendar.  This slot has traditionally gone to a generic show called “No Way Out”, but this year No Way Out is taking place later on and is being rebranded as a show full of cage matches (a gimmick which worked surprisingly well for the distant number two promotion TNA with their annual Lockdown show).

But the main story for this show is…

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It’s spring again, and time for the biggest wrestling show of the year.  This time, Wrestlemania is coming from Miami, where the weather has apparently been pretty dreadful of late.  And it’s an open-air arena.  But there’s a bloody great tent suspended over the ring, so unless the weather turns really atrocious, they should be okay.  Could be a long night for the live crowd, though.

As we’ve come to expect, the show is built around the headlining matches, with the idea being that the casual audience will be attracted by the big names, but that decent matches on the undercard should bring them back for more.  This is well and good in theory.  It’s notable, though, that this year’s two biggest matches actually feature wrestlers who aren’t on the regular roster at all, and are essentially semi-retired – with the Raw and Smackdown champions down at the third and fourth slots on the card.  It’s undoubtedly the case that the two top matches are bigger draws than anything the regular roster has to offer right now, but that in itself should be a cause of concern for the company.  There’s a risk in bringing back the likes of the Rock, which is that you draw attention to the company’s failure to create stars of similar magnitude in the years since.

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For the second month running, the WWE have made my life easy by not announcing a full card for Sunday’s show.  There are four matches officially announced for this show, and only three of them really count.  Presumably there will a couple of other random matches to fill out the card, which probably wouldn’t have done anything for viewership anyway – but there is a reason why promoters have traditionally announced the entire card, namely to avoid giving the impression that they’re just making stuff up at the last minute.  (Even though, in the WWE’s case, they often are.)

This is Elimination Chamber, the show that fills the gap between Royal Rumble in January and Wrestlemania in the spring.  On the January show, Sheamus won the Royal Rumble match, so he gets to challenge for either the Raw or Smackdown title at Wrestlemania.  In an ideal world you would now start the build for that match, but for some reason the WWE has decided that it would be a good idea to use the February show to put up both titles in six-man elimination matches, thus throwing the field of potential champions wide open.  This must be very convenient if you’re prone to last-minute storyline revisal, but it seems an odd time in the year to run matches that inevitably emphasise the potential randomness of the title-holder.

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Welcome back, for the first wrestling PPV preview of 2012!

Although this is not the easiest show to preview.  The Royal Rumble is traditionally the second biggest show of the year.  The winner of the titular 30-man battle royal gets to challenge for the world title (or, these days, one of the world titles) in the main event at Wrestlemania.  It is, therefore, the point where storylines kick into gear to start the long build to Wrestlemania in the spring.  It’s been in that role for 25 years now.  And, aware that the Royal Rumble pretty much sells itself, the WWE has more or less left it to do that.  They’ve announced a couple of title matches and something for John Cena; they’ve pushed the Rumble itself in general terms; but they haven’t announced anything else for the undercard, nor have they announced a full list of participants for the Rumble itself.  Apparently there is actually a reason for this.  We shall see.

1.  The 2012 Royal Rumble.  The design of the Royal Rumble match – with wrestlers drawing numbers at (ahem) random and entering in sequence over the course of an hour – is a masterstroke, allowing them to tell a range of stories during the hour.  A straight 30-man battle royal, with everyone starting in the ring at the same time, is usually just turgid.  Until the field is thinned out, there’s no room to do anything.  The Royal Rumble solves that problem brilliantly.

Sure, the element of random luck would make it a ludicrous way for any real sport to choose its top title contender.  But in wrestling, built-in unfairness is a positive boon.

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Reviews later.  For now… let’s preview tonight’s WWE show.  TLC (Tables Ladders & Chairs) is a hangover from the period when the company was experimenting with gimmicks for every show, and also from the days when they were a lot more cavalier about the injury risks in matches.  TLC matches started as amped-up versions of the ladder match, with added weaponry and more convoluted stunts, some of which were genuinely unwise.  Today’s product is a lot more restrained than that, and the random shoehorning of TLC matches into storylines that don’t call for them hasn’t helped either.  The upshot is that the TLC show now sits at the tail end of the pay per view calendar in a rather toned down form.

The established set-up is to have one TLC match coupled with one ladder match (winner is the first person to climb the ladder and the retrieve the whatever), one tables match (winner is the first person to throw their opponent through a cheap plywood table – it made more sense when ECW originated the idea, since they actually used those tables for their timekeepers), and one chairs match (in which, uh, chairs are legal as weapons – nobody had ever heard of such a pointless gimmick until the WWE had to invent it for the purpose of this show).

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Survivor Series holds a curious position in the WWE pay-per-view calendar.  In theory, it’s one of the “big four” shows that have been around since the early days of wrestling PPV – the others being Wrestlemania, the Royal Rumble, and Summerslam.  In practice, it’s been allowed to drift down in importance, and its gimmick of ten-man elimination matches has been steadily de-emphasised.  It continues to be presented as a slightly more significant show than others, but in an increasingly half-hearted way.

So there was some surprise when it was announced that this show had been chosen for the Rock’s return match.  While he’s certainly not going to return to any sort of regular wrestling schedule, he is going to wrestle John Cena in the main event at Wrestlemania 2012, and something had to be done to start the build-up for that.  Hence his appearance on tonight’s show.  Presumably, the theory is that Rock’s name will add more buys to Survivor Series than it would to January’s Royal Rumble.  Or maybe he’s just not free in January.

However it ended up happening, Survivor Series 2011 is very much a one-match show – or even a half match show, since Rock’s opponents aren’t going to be shifting many tickets in their own right.

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