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A year ago, the idea of a Stephanie McMahon vs. Brie Bella feud would have been preposterous.  Stephanie hadn't been a regular TV character for a long time, having seemingly moved to a reduced role behind the scenes so she had the time to become something closer to a full-time mom.  Brie was just the Bella twin without breast implants. Stephanie McMahon's journey as an on-screen performer has been a curious one.  Brought in out of nowhere as a babyface the night after WrestleMania 15, she was largely terrible, but in a way that almost enhanced her ingenue character. When she turned ...

With the annual WrestleMania special airing this Saturday night on NBC, Hulk Hogan did a conference call today to promote the broadcast. Being that WrestleMania was the main topic of discussion, the scope of the questions was generally limited to his thoughts on this year's show and his past WrestleMania matches. With Daniel Bryan out of action and the fact that telling his story would require covering two matches, he's nowhere to be found on the special. His matches were generally considered the best on the show, though. When it comes to Hogan's own pick for the best match at WrestleMania 30, ...

In 1985, shortly after the first WrestleMania, NBC started airing WWE's Saturday Night's Main Event specials every so often in the Saturday Night Live time slot on off weeks.  That type of prime TV real estate was a big part of making the pro wrestling boom under Hulk Hogan even bigger, and a number of the most memorable moments from the late '80s took place on SNME. This week, WWE Network completed their archive of every '80s episode of SNME, allowing fans to start to fill in the gaps between the already available pay-per-view events from when they were much less ...

On Monday's Raw, the SummerSlam main event was set: As expected, it's John Cena defending the WWE World Heavyweight Championship against Brock Lesnar.   Given the injuries and other issues plaguing WWE, it's absolutely the strongest main event that the company can put together right now. They first crossed paths in Ohio Valley Wrestling in late 2001 in a tag team feud and didn't meet again until 2003.  Lesnar was WWE Champion and badly miscast as a babyface.  As much as Lesnar had progressed into a tremendous performer with relative ease, Cena was still green and completely carried by his promos, which ...

WWE is nothing if not patterned a lot of the time. One of the most obvious patterns is that someone with a scheduled title shot will lose a bunch of matches in a row on TV if he's going to win the title. The idea is that you get a bunch of built-in challengers, and the new champion can afford the losses because he's going to gain so much by winning the title. Cesaro was seemingly on this path in the last few weeks. After Wade Barrett was injured and vacated the WWE Intercontinental Championship, Cesaro started losing all of his televised matches. ...

While there are plenty of things to criticize about the creative direction of WWE as of late and their hesitance to take risks, on the micro level, they were more than willing to experiment with telling stories differently in the past.  In the go-go-go world of WWE where—even on a three-hour show—some segments are shortchanged for running time, they suffer compared to more conventional pro wrestling stories.   Look at AJ Lee's feud with Paige so far.  AJ comes back out of nowhere, they do what appears to be a double turn without much explanation, and Paige loses the title.  The ...

After months of anticipation, Hulk Hogan announced WWE's newest signing on Saturday night at the company's house show in Osaka, Japan—Kenta, who recently bid farewell to Pro Wrestling Noah.  On Thursday, WWE posted a series of interviews with Triple H, Daniel Bryan, Cesaro and Seth Rollins to help introduce Kenta to WWE fans. Real name Kenta Kobayashi, he changed his ring name to KENTA (the formatting we'll use in this article when discussing his past work) to avoid confusion with Kenta Kobashi, the legendary star who served as his mentor and occasional tag team partner.  Early on, he was a promising high-flyer ...

Monday night on Raw, Ric Flair returned in a fairly odd segment.  Renee Young interviewed him about nothing in particular, Roman Reigns came out to shake his hand, and when Flair left, John Cena joined him, gave him the "Big Gold" World Heavyweight Championship belt and told him to keep it. That was the segment, and there was no sign of the belt for the rest of the show. The conventional wisdom is that ever since WWE finally reunified the two world titles in December at TLC, merchandising is the main reason why it kept using both physical belts instead of switching ...

Sometimes it's downright bizarre how different from each other NXT and the main roster WWE shows are. NXT is one hour a week and managed very economically with an interesting mix of old school studio wrestling, modern indie wrestling, and WWE production, while Raw can be bloated and monotonous. One of the most glaring differences, though, is how NXT presents female wrestlers. On the main shows, while the presentation has been heavily toned down with less revealing outfits and overtly sexual content, the Divas division, even in title matches, isn't exactly presented as "serious wrestling" the same way that the key ...

It's been a little over a month since Seth Rollins turned on Roman Reigns and Dean Ambrose, causing the split of The Shield, and all three are coming along nicely.Roman Reigns is clearly being pushed as WWE's next big star. Last night's Raw was an interesting test, as he got to do the show-opening in-ring promo for what I believe was the first time. He's shown a lot of poise and promise in his speaking, but this was different from the quick promos he's done in the past. He sounded slightly stilted, but overall he was protected well in a solid ...