TKO/HHH Playing in our Faces?

Just caught up on SmackDown, and what I saw was so bad that I felt the need to shout into the Reddit void about what's happening with WWE and it's product right now, because it's driving me nuts.

Over the last year or so, almost every single week I find myself questioning whether what we're seeing on our screens is the result of a booker both disconnected with the fan base that he's determined to contradict and undermine while being pressured from above to produce a new-era product that nobody really understands (I'm looking at you Paul), or if TKO bigwigs who have no experience in the professional wrestling sphere (I'm looking at you Ari) are the ones running the circus.

What I think we have is a horrible mix of both those realities. I think we have a head of creative who earned the role through a combination of outside circumstance and good graces earned running a much smaller show with a different set of end goals that brought out the best booker in him; and we're seeing that version of HHH just doesn't work when it comes to main roster booking. You can point to a more alive backstage environment and better production quality as some of the net positives from his leadership thus far, but for me that's far overshadowed by an endless stream of rivalries that just won't end, unfinished storylines and unsolved whodunit's and booking that just seems more and more confused and made up on the fly as time goes on.

I also can't ignore the fact that he might actually enjoy stroking his own ego more than Vince ever did. We've seen him open up show after show, interject himself into on-screen rivalries, put himself on the cover of the video game and even induct his own wife into the Hall of Fame. Not that I'm saying Stephanie doesn't deserve to be in there, but come on. Give us a break for just a little bit. And those weird press conferences, I feel like he's more invested in what the IWC are saying and how to get one over on them than Tony Khan is, and I honestly wouldn't be surprised if that was one of the key factors in some of the nonsensical booking we've seen from him.

One of the biggest problems with the company right now is something I don't see enough people talking about in the online space: the UFC-ification of the WWE product. Sponsors anywhere you can get them, five-match cards and a relentless ad and promo package experience during PLE's that just makes me feel that I'm not even watching a WWE product any more. And for me, that can only come from the TKO influence up high. I would really love to one day know if HHH is the one responsible for the trimming down of match card lengths as a sort of ode to his successful NXT booker days, or if it was done to mimic what we get from UFC main cards. Whatever the case may be, I think we're seeing that what works for one product may not work for another and the overall viewer experience has tanked to new lows as a result of the experiment.

Finally, we get to the celebrity involvement in the WWE product. I get that it's always been a thing (especially around WrestleMania time) for celebrities to be involved in storylines heading into the biggest show of them all, and you can look to people like Mayweather, Tyson & even more recently Knoxville & the Jackass boys all being examples of successful celebrity integration. What we seldom got under Vince however, was celebrity involvement in the main wrestling storylines. Celebrity and championship level professional wrestling were almost mutually exclusive, and the fan experience was much better for it. You wanted to see Snooki wrestle Melina? You could have that. Wanna see Sami & Knoxville brawl all over the arena? Of course. And then you wanna watch two lifelong professional wrestlers do what they do best for the biggest prizes in the sport, you got that in your main events. Everybody got something, and it was great. Now under TKO & HHH we have Dwayne flitting in and out of the product when it suits making irreversible storyline changes as he goes, we have TRAVIS SCOTT interfering in WrestleMania main events featuring John Cena, and going into this year we have Jelly Roll & Pat McAfee as integral parts of a feud that wrote itself and didn't need any of it just because they could. It's just non-sensical rubbish that makes me question more than anything else whether we're dealing with a collection of top brass who are genuinely lost at sea unsure of which direction they're heading and what the fans want, or a group of overpaid businessmen who are just playing in the faces of those who love the sport to see what they can get away with, for their own amusement.

Whatever the answers are, right now I just have so many questions; and the main ones being whether or not this company, their product and the people shaping it are worth my time and energy as a fan, or it it's time to just let it go. Maybe a sign of the times and how bad things really are that that's where I'm at when we're only a few weeks away from what should feel like Christmas come late to a wrestling fan.