WWE Raw Review - 19th May 2008

After being away for over a week and missing TNA Sacrifice as well as all the weekly WWE and TNA shows I was looking forward to tuning in to Raw to see what had happened since I had been away.

Good Points

Good Start

The show started with a bang with the return to Raw of Jeff Hardy after his surprise appearance at Judgement Day. He has been thrown in to another programme with Umaga but at least it was an intense match with Umaga knocking out Jeff Hardy outside of the ring. This is also a good way to ease Jeff back in before he hopefully makes his way back up the card.

Setting up for One Night Stand

With only two weeks to go before ONS they used this episode of Raw well to get four matches announced for it. We had Batista beating Jericho to get a match against HBK at ONS, we had the team of Randy Orton and JBL beating HHH and John Cena so that they could both get rematches from Judgment Day and we had the returning Jeff Hardy beating pitted against Umaga. All of these are stipulation matches.

Katie Lea given some promo time

It was great to see Katie Lea given some promo time as she confronted Mickie James backstage. She is great on the mic and has some great character skills. That would be a big boost for her career if she was put in an ongoing storyline with the Women’s champion.

Bad Points

Lack of use of HHH

We had to wait nearly two hours until we saw the heavyweight champion on screen and his only involvement was a quick backstage segment followed by his match. A heavyweight champion is suppose to carry the brand and be the main reason that people tune in so to use him like this is majorly under using him.

All the time invested Regal gone to waste

Over the last few weeks Regal has been given more on screen time than ever before to build his character of the out of control general manager. All of WWE’s investment came to nothing this week as after he had to be suspended for his second drug violation. To get him off screen quickly he lost to Mr. Kennedy in a loser gets fired match which was all very rushed. I think that drug testing is positive for the company although it can play havoc with the storylines. If WWE is going to invest time in someone they need to make sure that they are clean.

Overall

A mixed bag in all. They did well setting for One Night Stand but they need to remember that to get pay per view buys you have to get people watching the free weekly shows and to do that you have to put on an entertaining show. So they need to learn to build for PPV’s in a way that is entertaining for the viewers although trying to build for a PPV in two weeks is madness.