WWE Smackdown Review - Friday 2nd May 2008

After the worst Raw in living history I was hoping Smackdown could provide me with some thought out entertainment as well as their usual quality wrestling bouts.

Good Points

Strong Start

The show opened solidly with a Theodore Long announcing that all the Smackdown belts were going to be on the line tonight. Although the intelligent fans know that titles rarely change hands on TV it gets the casual fans and the live audience hyped up.

Start of a new feud

After his feud with Khali, The Big Show has now started a feud with the only remaining monster for him on Smackdown mark Henry. Although I’m not a fan of big man matches it’s nice to see Big Show enforcing his dominance by beating on the other big guys which will then put him in a strong place for main event feuds with smaller guys.

Bad Points

Not enough talking

After recent improvements with Smackdown and them having more non wrestling segments it was back to the old formula of just having match after match. Viewers start changing channels when they aren’t interested by who wins or loses and the only way you make them interested is by giving them a storyline. If they want to keep viewers and attract new viewers they need to find a brand of sports entertainment like they have on Raw but put their own spin on it.

Poor card strength

I went to a Samckdown house show a few backs and was impressed by the strength of the card however if I had pay to be in the audience for this Smackdown taping I would have asked for a refund. We had Finlay fighting a non named jobber, Koslov fighting Colin Delaney a rare appearance by Nunzio and the return of Jesse and Festus going against Edge’s cronies. For a card boasting three title matches it was very weak.

Smackdown ends like Raw with a crazy finish

Ok this wasn’t quite on par with Raw’s worst ending ever but it was still very poor. After building Undertaker for so long they decided to have Vickie Guerrero strip him of the title in a move that no one saw coming and for a stupid reason. The reason given was because his choke hold was illegal and that he was hurting Smackdown stars. It would have made more sense to have Undertaker getting disqualified on a regular basis first because of the choke hold and then get the title taken away. Because this wasn’t built many fans would have missed this so was a very silly out of the blue idea which like Raw I wouldn’t be surprised if it was just cooked up five minutes before the show.

Overall

I’m glad I am going away in a week’s time to escape the current terrible state of WWE booking. I can’t believe both shows were so terribly booked.