The Katz Files – Arnie Katz
When Bad Writing Hurts Good Wrestling
The Kingfish turns up the heat on a few of the folks who script the dramatic segments on WEE and TNA shows.
There is no fan so soulless as to have never said, “I wish they’d do it this way,.” when watching professional wrestling in the relative quiet of their living room. And it would dishonest not to admit that all of us have occasionally enjoyed Walter Mitty-ish dreams of taking over the booking to “show them how it’s done.”
That’s part of the fun of being a smart wrestling fan, like second-guessing umpires in baseball and debating the judges’ scoring in championship boxing matches. Some fans have given into such fantasies and written elaborate columns in which a half-dozen guys commit career suicide while their special favorites miraculously rise to the pinnacle of success.
I’d also like a crack at it, but I promise you that this edition of The Katz Files isn’t an excuse to audition for the job. There’s plenty wrong with the booking in both major promotions, but both feature a lot of effective booking, too. You can fault TNA for inconsistency and abrupt direction changes and cite WWE for pointless plots that puff up non-wrestlers, but Samoa Joe vs. Angle and Jeff Hardy vs. Randy Orton feuds show both promotions can hit the target.
The topic this time is not match-making and choreography, but the writing of dramatic scenes. The Hornswoggle story and the AJ Styles story are examples of a bad idea implemented with dull and unimaginative writing.
The Hornswoggle epic sinks due to one basic, inescapable fact: it has not and will not lead to any matches fans will pay to see. The focus of the plot is a man who manifestly cannot wrestle any WWE performer credibly.
I think WWE has realized this, which is why Fit Finley is now back in the center of the story and dark hits about a “deal” between Finley and Mr. McMahon. That’s better, but still, it’s not like fans are that wild about the Fighting Irishman.
The worst aspect of this storyline is the endless backstage scenes in which Mr. McMahon proclaims his “tough love” policy. Vince McMahon does a great job of putting over these scenes, but it’s hard to miss the fact that it’s all one hell of a lot of wheel-spinning, repetitive crap that adds up to exactly nothing.
What possible good can come of Hornswoggle being in the Royal Rumble? Anything he does in the ring is a sideshow to the stuff fans want to see. And having him win the Royal Rumble, no matter how inventive the swerve, would just cheapen to the Rumble and undercut its role as a lead-in to WrestleMania.
We’re talking about Hornswoggle Hornswoggle. Who really cares what he does or where he goes. It was an annoying enough when he used to come out from under the ring to interfere in Finley’s matches; putting him on TV this match and forcing him into the matches makes the whole show worse. It’s not even like he’s got a silver tongue with the mic.
The AJ Styles plotline is an embarrassing and counter-productive failure for a whole different set of reasons. It has triumphed over some good matches and even some good writing to be a big unsightly blotch on the face of TNA.
Making Styles and Tomko choose between the Angle Alliance and the Christian Coalition is good, old-fashioned booking. It’s even kind of nice that the story hasn’t gone directly to a split in the tag team and a fight over possession of the two belts.
Unfortunately, they dragged out Styles’ indecision and, in the process, inflated his mindless dithering to cartoon-lie proportions, to keep it going far beyond its allotted time. Keeping it going until the pay per view made sense in some ways, but continuing the idea for weeks after he spurned Christian is going to the well too often.
Some analysts have complained that TNA lacks stars, because the promotion books in a way that pulls guys back to the pack instead of making them seem special. The way they’ve destroyed the credibility of AJ Styles is an especially sad example. As great as he is in the ring, as successful as he has been in TNA, Styles is back down to the mid-card again as a result of this demeaning angle. (Notice that, despite the air-time-hogging storyline, AJ Styles won’t be wrestling that PPV title match.)
Styles’ protracted indecision led TNA books into other, secondary, errors, too. They made announcer Jeremy Borash look stupid and put him into situations that aren’t appropriate for a mic man. The need for lots of dramatic vignettes meant that fans saw Borash hanging with the Angles like a love-struck puppy and hovering over Sharkboy’s deathbed at the same time, which didn’t lend much realism to either set of scenes.
A Final Thought on Writing
Dramatic scenes express aspects of the stories that go beyond the straight-forward action in the ring and set up the context for the matches. The right angle gives a match meaning and significance while guiding fans to love the babyface more and the heel less.
Plots that go nowhere, plots that undercut individual characters instead of building them up, plots that come across as ludicrous and stupid – they don’t help the show at all. In fact, bad writing can turn a potentially exciting match into so much card-filler.
The Kingfish Says
I hope everyone is enjoying the revived and reinvigorated ProWrestlingDaily.com as much as we are getting back to out posts on the firing line.
Please remember to spread the word about our return and, if you’d like to take a more active role, see the call for writers near the top of the “Breaking News” on the main page.
See you all tomorrow with another column!
– Arnie Katzenjammer editor-in-chief
ProWrestlingDaily.com
(1/20/08)
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