If there is any company guilty of near-shameless monopoly and overexposure right now, it’s certainly the WWE. The utter domination of the mainstream professional wrestling scene not only in America, but all over the world, coupled with the comical mismanagement and the general lack of resources of its competitors to keep up allows them to force-feed the Vince McMahon product to viewers who don’t know any better. Sometimes, it’s palatable, if not tolerable, but some other times, VKM’s complacency allows a show with a lot to be desired to slip through the cracks.
The glut continues the previous week with the third big PPV event in two months – this year’s edition of Hell in a Cell. This – bottlenecking September and October with more pay-per-views than the business model (and the fans) could handle – has been a practice for the past few years now, forcing rushed resolutions, unnatural conclusions, and shoddy writing and matchmaking for the near future. The WWE keeps changing up the before and after, keeping the October slate in a state of flux as they look for a reliable formula; in previous years we’ve had Bragging Rights, the revived Vengeance, this year Battleground, but they seem intent on keeping Hell in a Cell the lead-in to Survivor Series. It never works. This has always been a problem, and it will continue to be as long as Vince is greedy.
This column, however, is a look into the PPV that had just gone by, and not a big-picture assessment, so let’s get right into that. This is How Not to Book a PPV – the Hell in a Cell 2013 edition. The disclaimer remains: I don’t care who gets offended at what they think I know or don’t know.
First off, though, because I’m not a completely negative person, I will admit that this show learned a little from some of the mistakes I pointed out in the last one. Whether it’s because they truly learned their lesson or certain factors forced some changes, they managed to avoid some mistakes this time around.