For the second year running, the WWE is rounding off the PPV calendar with TLC – that’s Tables, Ladders and Chairs.  It’s something of a throwback to a few years ago when wrestling featured completely insane (and shamelessly contrived) stunts on a semi-regular basis.  The company has toned that sort of thing down substantially for a variety of reasons.  For one thing, they’re now positioning themselves as a PG company.  That decision wasn’t purely about supporting Linda McMahon’s senate election bid, as some fans seem to think; it’s also about placating the company’s licensees and trying to hang on to the kids who love John Cena as an audience for the future.  Another factor is that the company seems rather more attentive to the risk of injury to its performers; their motivations for doing so may well revolve around minimising criticism of the company and making sure that vital headliners aren’t sidelined for months just for the sake of a throwaway moment, but the bottom line is the same.

So in theory TLC ought to be one of the better placed theme PPVs, based around gimmick matches that the company largely steers clear of.  The name derives from a match which was originally conceived for a three-way tag-team feud between the Hardy Boys, the Dudleys and Edge & Christian, back in 2000.  The ladders are self-explanatory; ladder matches have been around for decades.  Originally the idea was simply that you had to beat up your opponent badly enough to climb the ladder without interference and retrieved the title belt (or whatever it was), but over time we’ve seen increasingly creative use made of the ladders as a legal weapon.  The Hardys were supposed to be the ladder match specialists.  Tables come from the Dudleys, who had started out in the original ECW with a gimmick of throwing opponents through cheap plywood tables (of the sort that ECW had at ringside for the timekeeper and so on – it wasn’t quite so plainly contrived when it was first created).  Wrestlers of the period rather liked this idea because it had the dual advantage of looking fairly spectacular while actually being a lot safer than taking the same move without the table in the way, since the table absorbs some of the impact.  And chairs… well, Edge & Christian had been hitting people with them a lot in 1999-2000 and they needed something to represent the third team.  Plus, it made for a neat “TLC” pun.

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The WWE sure is making life easy for me with these columns.  Once again, we’ve got a card that’s based around one or two core matches, with the rest filled out randomly at the last minute.  Which means there’s less to say about them.

Survivor Series, in theory, is one of the major shows on the WWE’s pay-per-view calendar, although it long since drifted hopelessly from the original theme of ten-man elimination tag matches.  It’s ironic that in a period when the WWE has generally been trying to build their shows around gimmick themes, Survivor Series has actually been going the other way, even while it holds on to the name as a relic from yesteryear.  There’s one elimination match on this year’s show, and it’s very much a last-minute affair designed to get the Smackdown crew on the show.

The other thing to bear in mind about this show is that the WWE have got it into their heads that there’s a proud tradition of doing screwjob finishes in the main event at Survivor Series.  This harks back to the notorious “Montreal screwjob” at Survivor Series 1997, when the outgoing Bret Hart was genuinely doublecrossed to bring about a result that he wasn’t willing to co-operate in.  While the WWE seems to have finally stopped banging on about the resulting storyline – which it kept harking back to years after anyone in their right mind had stopped caring – the notion that you get weird double-cross finishes in Survivor Series main events seems to have taken root.  Which is why they’re building this show around a main event whose central selling point is the promise of a ludicrous finish…

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I’m writing this on Thursday night, before Smackdown airs, so by the time you read this post, it may well be out of date.  But probably not.  Bragging Rights, Sunday’s WWE pay-per-view, is a classic example of a show that’s only on the schedule because the company stubbornly refuses to accept that it didn’t work last year – and so they’re going to do it again this year, in order to prove that it definitely, absolutely doesn’t work.

In the event, the company seems to have rather lost interest in the business of wrestling this last week, preferring to hurl itself into a frankly ludicrous tantrum over some of the negative press coverage arising from Linda McMahon’s Senate run.  Strictly speaking the WWE isn’t allowed to campaign for the boss’s wife, but Vince McMahon is apparently so incensed by what he sees as unjustified attacks on his beloved business that he’s started devoting airtime to an absurd campaign which he calls “Stand Up For WWE”, in which fans are invited to sign some sort of online petition.  Unfortunately for him, most of the criticisms of the WWE are entirely justified, and he doesn’t have any convincing rebuttal to offer.  Some of them are a bit outdated – the company has actually being doing PG programming for at least a year now – but they’re perfectly valid if your point is to criticise what the company was like when Linda was CEO.

So, while the company embarks on a high-profile attempt to make itself look stupid, it’s unlikely we’ll being seeing any last-minute moves to flesh out this half-baked card.  (Not least because Smackdown is taped on Tuesday nights, so we already know everything that happens in the ring.)  There’ll probably be a couple of last-minute additions to fill time, but that’s about it.

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If you’re looking for the new House to Astonish episode, then you’ll find it the next post down.  Reviews this evening, and a couple of music posts upcoming in the week.  (Um, we’re running a bit late again.)  But now… a wrestling pay-per-view that even the WWE can’t seem to summon up much interest in.

Hell in a Cell has a dreadful slot on the PPV schedule.  Generally, the company has tried to go back to one show a month.  But for some reason this is an exception.  It’s only been two weeks since Night of Champions, and it’s only another three weeks until Bragging Rights, a Raw-versus-Smackdown theme show that died in 2009 and seems unlikely to do any better in 2010.

A two-week build-up is problematic to start with.  And on top of that, the company has had other things to worry about, with Smackdown jumping networks to its new home on Syfy.  American viewers baffled as to how a professional wrestling show ended up on that network in the first place can at least take comfort in knowing that NXT has been booted off American television altogether – though masochists can still see it on the internet.

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The WWE’s September pay-per-view doesn’t seem to be one of their top priority shows.  That’s perhaps understandable, since Smackdown is about to jump networks to Syfy in a few weeks time.  As a side effect, Syfy is booting NXT off the network, leaving it without a home in the USA.  The WWE apparently intends to keep making the show and streaming it on their website.  Good luck with that one.  Anyhow, you can see why they might want to leave really big, attention grabbing events for a few weeks down the line.

The gimmick with Night of Champions is supposed to be that every title is defended.  And that isn’t really such a big deal.  As a rule, pay-per-views always see most of the titles being defended.  It’s hard to imagine the company getting many extra buys simply by promising that both versions of the women’s title will be contested on the same show.  In fact, the proliferation of secondary titles (and the duplication of the world title) has generally damaged the drawing power of the company’s titles – something that they may be about to work on.  But more on that later.  And as it happens, this show includes one match with no title on the line, while they haven’t yet announced anything for the tag team titles.

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I may have skipped last month’s show, but Summerslam tonight is an interesting one on a couple of levels.

Summerslam is traditionally one of the WWE’s big shows of the year (in the second tier after Wrestlemania, along with Royal Rumble in January and Survivor Series in the autumn).  This is really is just a hangover from the days when there were only four PPVs a year, but the name still has a certain added credibility – not least because the company usually puts a bit more effort into these shows.

This year, it’s something of a one match show.  But it’s a match that they’ve been building to for months, in a storyline which has dominated Raw for much of that time.  And now, for the first time, it’s a leading to match.  All too often, the WWE loses its nerve with this sort of long-term build, but this time they’ve got it right, and in theory at least, that ought to result in a lot of interest for this show.  Whether the match will be any good… well, that’s more of an unknown factor.  But unusually, that might even add to the curiosity here.

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It’s been a while since the WWE put on a pay-per-view that seemed like quite such an afterthought. But a number of injuries to top names have derailed the build for this show, and the whole thing has rather been overtaken by a storyline that, in theory at least, doesn’t feature on the show at all.

Fatal 4-Way continues the WWE’s big idea of giving each show its own gimmick.  But there’s a limit to how many gimmick matches you can do.  We’re scraping the bottom of the barrel here, with a show notionally built around 4-way matches.  (The “fatal” bit is, presumably, because the WWE rules make these matches sudden death – first pinfall or submission wins the title, regardless of who gets pinned.  Also, it’s alliterative.)

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Here’s something we haven’t had in a while – a WWE pay-per-view with no theme whatsoever.

For a while now, the WWE’s philosophy has been that every show needs its own gimmick.  And to be sure, there was an issue in the past with all the second-tier shows being rather interchangeable.  But if every show has a theme, it becomes rather wearing.  Moreover, it means that you get gimmick matches because of the show theme, rather than to serve a story.  (Traditionally, you start a feud with a regular match and build to gimmicks in the rematch as the stakes get higher…)

This month, we do indeed have a regular card of wrestling matches.  There are gimmicks, but for storyline purposes.  And for once, the midcard wrestlers are getting a reasonable amount of exposure.

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Traditionally the month after Wrestlemania is a bit quiet.  That’s partly because the WWE ends all its major storylines at the big show, and partly because they usually haven’t given a great deal of thought to what comes next.  So the following pay-per-view, which used to be Backlash, has generally been a bit forgettable, at least from a storyline standpoint.

The WWE have rejigged their pay-per-view schedule for 2010, so as to cut back the number of shows, and to pursue their policy of giving every show a theme of its own.  So Backlash has been dispensed with, and we’re jumping straight to Extreme Rules, the show where… well, this takes a bit of explaining.

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And so we come to Wrestlemania 26, the biggest event of the WWE calendar, and effectively the end of the current season.  Granted, the next season starts 24 hours later with the next episode of Raw, but April is usually a breather month before any major new storylines get underway.  Insofar as a never-ending series can be said to build to a climax, Wrestlemania is that annual climax.

Normally I’d do this preview over the weekend, but I’m going to be out of town, so we’ll just have to do it now… (more…)