Let's not beat around the bush here: Monday Night Raw is terrible. It's been terrible for quite a while, but seems to get progressively worse every week, and has now reached the point that it is comfortably the most difficult-to-watch pro-wrestling show on TV.
If you (somehow) managed to sit through all three torturous hours of last night's episode, you may have noticed that it was even more stale and repetitive than usual, and now we know why.
According to PW Mania, it was yet another case of the script being "ripped up" right before the show aired, resulting in several rematches taking place. So, we saw Charlotte Flair vs. Asuka (again), Shelton Benjamin vs. Cedric Alexander (again), Sheamus vs. Humberto Carrillo (again), and Natalia and Tamina defending their WWE Women's Championships against Nia Jax and Shayna Baszler (again) in the main event.
Look, we're not trying to bury the wrestlers themselves, and some of these matches were at least competently put together and would have been perfectly fine in a vacuum, but were we really supposed to give a damn about any one of these feuds or angles? Raw is marketed to be the company's flagship show, and we are subjected to a tsunami of mediocrity week after week.
The episode actually went off the air with Baszler grabbing Reginald and challenging him to a match next week. That's how they ended the show. That's the hook they believe will encourage fans to tune in next Monday. To see one half of the women's tag-champs face the dude that used to carry Carmella's champaign.
At least things can only get better once live shows return... right?