I like this. I don't have cable and don't watch Raw, but good lord it's nice to see someone actually enjoy wrestling for a change.

Thanks, I just like to look at the product from a less cynical perspective. It's entertainment, it's fun and when I stop enjoying it then I'll stop watching it. I don't see that happening though because I have never missed a RAW in the history of the show...

@jbg4: Do you watch any other wrestling shows? NXT? NJPW? Lucha Underground? DDT?

Basically everything except for TNA (I watched it for years and even someone as optimistic as me had to give up a couple of years ago)... I've only watched a couple of Lucha Underground shows because it comes on at strange times here for some reason.

I love NXT. Some of my favorite guys are down there... I love Balor, Itami, Zayn, Owens, as they are in the WWE system. I watched all of those guys for years and it's cool to see them adapting so well to the new surroundings.

I watched a lot more NJPW 6-7 years ago but I have caught a couple of recent shows and it's just as good as I remember.

Great review, thanks for doing this. I'm absolutely fascinated that they decided to go with Bryan v Reigns at Fastlane. That should be a great matchup, in large part because I don't think anyone really knows which way they're going to go with it.

Did you catch the Austin/HHH podcast afterwards? What did you think?

@godhugh: I plan to watch it tomorrow... I'll throw a comment at you when I do and let you know my thoughts on it.

The Vince podcast was so awesome that I have high hopes for the HHH one, especially with all the talk about him on the Internet. One day Internet fans hate him because he's burying guys, then they love him because of NXT...

The HHH podcast wasn't as awesome as the Vince one but it was still good. He had some really interesting things to say about his philosophy and the one thing that stuck out to me was after Austin asked what he would change about the product and HHH said the third hour of RAW and a slower burn on story lines.

I really hope there is a plan for more of these and I would love a follow-up with both Hunter and Vince to dive a little deeper, also it would be cool to see some live sitdowns after RAW with some of the guys, Cena, Bryan, Reigns, and whoever else.

Raw was pretty good once we got past the 30 minute opening segment. It isn't a problem of what anyone said or did it is that they need to get that out of the way in about half the time.

Every top guy over the last 15-20 years happened organically like Bret, Shawn, Austin, and Cena... all of those guys were made by the fans. The WWE didn't have to try to convince fans that they liked those guys because they already knew it. It's the same reaction that Bryan and Ziggler are getting now. I'm not sure why Vince has held back on those guys but there has to be something and I don't think it's size; I'm just not sure exactly what it is.

I'm a Daniel Bryan fan and I think that a lot of the more savvy fans see him as an extension of themselves, someone who doesn't look like the idea of a WWE wrestler is but made it on his own and is, possibly, the best in the entire company. I just wish fans would stop booing the booking and get back to reacting to the guy in the ring as opposed to the guy in the office with the pencil.

I enjoyed the talking segment because it did a good job to set-up the through-line for the rest of the show but I am totally with you on the fact that it should have probably been cut in half.

Hey, more positivity is always a good thing.

I've always felt that way. I would just rather be happy than angry. Wrestling is entertainment and something I have always loved watching... thanks for reading!

I am really looking forward to the match at Fast Lane between Bryan and Reigns because I think DB will bring out the best match we've seen from Roman yet, even better than his SummerSlam match with Randy Orton that I really liked.

100% agree.

In the last six months, I've returned to watching wrestling seriously for the first time since 2003/2004. It's tough to express my feeling on the internet/crowd reaction to a lot of what's happened in 2014, or even since Survivor Series.

On one hand, wrestling is this special thing precisely because of the crowd involvement. The audience is supposed to be vocal, supposed to chide the heels and rally behind the faces. On the other, a lot of this--especially lately--has just seemed disruptive. Kind of for the sake of it. I'd like for the audience--and for the internet wrestling fanbase--to focus more on the telling of the stories, on the building of the characters. Looking at kayfabe the way we might look at the plot of of a comic book or a television program and considering wrestlers the way we consider the artists or performers responsible for filling those spaces. Perhaps it's a skeevy byproduct of wrestling having blurred the lines between fact and fiction, but witch-hunting prominent performers and hijacking events because of circumstances beyond the mat doesn't seem justified. It feels exclusionary. It feels gross.

Like, okay. What if fan X enjoys watching Roman Reigns perform? What does that mean? What does that mean if fan X is just starting to watch the product? What does that mean if fan X is a long-time follower? Suddenly people who want to enjoy this aspect of the performance, of the story, get driven away by a mass reaction based not on "the story's internal logic doesn't work" but on "this guy's getting a push because Vince loves his look." I don't think it's particularly fair to the talent, but it's excruciatingly unfair to new and old viewers alike. It's a bias. It's like talking through a film screening in a movie theater.

Anyway. I'm with you, @jbg4. Wrestling is better right now than the vocal wrestling fanbase might have you believe. I'm genuinely excited to see what the WWE creative staff does to deal with this reaction. I think they have a much more difficult job than most of us realize or want to admit.

I think that the WWE has brought a lot of the backlash from fans on themselves thanks to all of the behind the scenes stuff that they have been doing over the last several years. It has given a level of transparency to the fans that was never available before and more and more "smarks" seem to think that because they know more of what goes on backstage that they know everything. The WWE pulled back the curtain just enough to give the internet fan a sense of entitlement in that they have the power now to make or break guys and I think that kind of stinks but it is something that we have to live with.

When Triple H sits on a podcast on the WWE Network and says to Steve Austin that "kayfabe is dead" I think hurts them more than helps.

You seem to think the EXACT same way that I do about the WWE product right now. As smart as the internet fan thinks they are they can never fully know what goes into Vince making the decision to strap the rocket to a guy and shoot him straight to the top... for a large publicly traded company Vince has to have teams of people who bring him reports and spreadsheets with merchandise sales and ratings trends that show him that Roman Reigns is moving the needle in the right ways for him to give him the win at the Rumble and the main event at Mania.

I have really enjoyed the product over the last 6 months, I think they hit a bit of a lull after Bryan got hurt last year but since SummerSlam I think they have really been firing on all cylinders. The rise of the former Shield members has been cool to watch, Brock Lesnar just destroying everyone and becoming this unstoppable monster, MIZDOW, Bray Wyatt, and the list goes on of things that I have thought were really cool.

@historyinrust: People don't like being told what they want. When the fans continually say "we want X" and the WWE's response is "nah, actually you want Y", people are going to get upset. Is it Reigns' fault? No. Does he deserve a lot of the hate he's getting? No because he never should have put in this position to begin with. People can't boo "management" or Vince so the only way to communicate "we don't like this" is to boo the wrestlers you don't like. Is that fair? Probably not but that's the business and that's the way it's always been. People are not just going to accept the story being told and just clap their hands if the story sucks. They're going to let you know "this story sucks."

If you want a wrestling show where the crowd plays along with the story, you should watch NXT. I can guarantee you that everyone in the NXT crowd loves Kevin Owens but right now, he's a bad guy so the crowd boos. They do this because NXT respects their audience. They know what they want and to the best of their ability, they give them that. At the Royal Rumble, the WWE did not respect its audience so they got what they got.

Hoping for another one of these, by the way, @jbg4.

I like this and I like you. Always good to see someone who takes things on as positive an angle as I do. And I'm totally with you on booing the wrestler versus booing the booking, for a number of reasons. Not only is it tough on the person out there who is just doing their job, but also I feel like even a misdirected segment can be good when a crowd goes along with it.

If the fans had gone along with stuff at the Rumble, but then shown their disapproval at the end (or at the least stuck to cheering for the people they like rather than booing those in the place they want that person to be) it would still have been a fun time, but as it turned out I found it difficult to watch cause I spent most of my time feeling bad for the guys out there.

It's a tough one though - you have to provide feedback as a fan, and finding the right time to do that (when it will be heard by the right people but without detracting from others in the company) is difficult to say the least.