The final big four Pay Per View of 2020 is now in the books. Unfortunately, it also felt the flattest of the four. While Royal Rumble had the unfair advantage of thousands of fans, due to being held pre pandemic, post COVID shows have felt enjoyable. A two night Wrestlemania had some very entertaining cinematic matches and made the best out of what was going on at the time. Summerslam had the talking points of the in ring debut of Dominik Mysterio and the peak of the Bayley and Banks partnership. Survivor Series just did not feel like it had an impact like the other three shows mentioned. Here is why…
Too Soon?
The selling point of Survivor Series is brand warfare. RAW and Smackdown exclusive stars fighting and interacting in first time matches. In the past few years, apart from the Royal Rumble, stars from their respective brands would barely lock up with superstars on the opposition. However, now there are far too many exceptions to the rule. Women’s tag champions can appear on any shows. With the male superstars, if they show up on the other brand, it’s just thrown away in an “unsanctioned” match. Because of this, the big match of Sasha Banks vs Asuka happened at Summerslam and many times on RAW. There’s also the matter that the draft only happened last month. Many interactions in the elimination matches have been seen on TV just a few weeks ago.
Brand warfare is non existent.
Think back to the past few years build up to Survivor Series. In the build up, general managers of both shows send superstars to invade the opposing show. On the night, a tracker keeps scores of the brands and an overall winner is determined at the end. This year, there was no general manger (because there are none), no brand invasions and no keeping track of scores. At the end of the night, there was no announcement as to who won Survivor Series. The time between Hell in a Cell and now just feels pointless. All storylines were put on hold for brand warfare, but with no war.
They phoned it in.
Survivor Series was marketed differently in 2020. Instead of brand warfare, the show was built around 30 years of The Undertaker in WWE. This is rightfully deserved, because no one will argue The Undertaker shouldn’t have this honour and platform to formally retire. The issue is that WWE knew people would sign up for the network just to see this. Therefore, the rest of the card suffered. Many matches had bizarre finishes. Also as mentioned before, most of it will mean nothing in the long run. Unfortunately, when WWE shows this lack of effort in ring, fans will show less effort to watch in the coming months.
Featured image: WWE
