Adam Blampied’s Pipebomb: Does Survivor Series Deserve To Be Saved?

Of course, such a basic card wouldn’t pass muster today. With three hours of Raw and two of SmackDown, the current roster is more over-exposed than it’s ever been. The appeal of seeing Superstars wrestling in unusual combinations is all but diminished, because most of the current roster have, by this point, wrestled most of the current roster. 

With that being said, the appeal of a traditional 5-on-5 elimination match in the modern era rests largely on two things. 

First, the multi-man action mid-match. In the current ‘graps’ landscape of wrestling, the in-ring action is by-and-large great in Survivor Series matches. 2016’s 52-minute epic was more stuffed than Batista’s trunks. Every year, there tends to be at least one elimination match worth watching and a handful in the past decade could feature in the top 5 greatest of all time. So if folks are looking for one reason to keep Survivor Series, ‘fun wrestling’ is a pretty important one.

However, it’s in the second facet of a Survivor Series match’s appeal that WWE is currently struggling with, and that’s the storyline/build that goes into putting the 10 wrestlers/teams into the position where they have a big old scrap. While the Royal Rumble match requires only the bare minimum of build going into it, owing to the randomised nature of it and easy-to-understand title shot stakes, for the last few years, the booking that’s been implemented in order to create Survivor Series matches have been inconsistent at best, and permanently damaging at worst.

When looking at the truly elite Survivor Series 5-on-5s, what unites them all is a rock solid story. In 2001, the losing team’s company would go out of business, in 2003 Steve Austin’s team needed to win or he’d be gone from WWE, in 2014 either The Authority would be disbanded or multiple wrestlers would be fired. These are perfect examples of match type and storyline melding perfectly.

However, it’s unfortunately rare. Such is the way with the modern era’s calendar, crammed full of stipulation-specific pay per view formats, that often, instead of a stipulation being implemented in order to match the tone and intensity of the current feud, the current feud has to be augmented in unnatural and forced ways in order to fit the stipulation because, well, it’s that time of the year again. While this augmentation isn’t as jarring as regular Hell in the Cell booking, for the last few years WWE has shown shocking disregard to its own roster for the sake of throwing an elimination match together.

In 2017, the key phrase was #UnderSiege and this was problematic, not least because some wrestlers (and even some of WWE’s Twitter accounts) don’t know how to spell the word ‘Siege’. Despite being a babyface at Hell in a Cell, and using his babyface status to facilitate Sami Zayn’s own heel turn, Shane McMahon suddenly began acting like a total bellend, invading poor Kurt Angle’s show and using a blue army to ambush unsuspecting Raw superstars. Amongst these invaders: Becky Lynch, The New Day, The Hype Bros, Bobby Roode, AJ Styles. All of them were f*cking babyfaces?! WHAT ARE YOU DOING, WWE?

In order to turn the brand split into Company Warfare ™ for a single, non-canon month, WWE Creative took a hot curl on their current roster. Look, I’m not advocating the basic Team Goody vs. Team Baddy nature of the 1980s Survivor Series matches, but at least they weren’t confusing and infuriating. In 2018, Becky Lynch was tearfully asking ‘why is it so hard to do the right thing’ and now she’s stomping defenceless dudes with zero explanation. They did this in 2016 as well, with Bayley helping long-term rivals Charlotte and Dana clump the Smackdown women around despite being F*CKING BAYLEY. What makes this so goddamn weird is that, come the match itself, despite her team being presented in that segment as purely heelish, the team was still being portrayed as comprising both heels and faces, with the announcers worrying if they can ‘all get along.’ 

My brain hurts. Stop this. If this is the price that we have to pay in order to engineer a Survivor Series match then maybe they should be destroyed. What’s worst about all of these, is that the brand split actually does make Survivor Series more relevant. Maintaining separate brands and bringing them together for this one night makes way more sense than Team Foley vs Team Ziggler or whatever, but they are handling it in the worst possible way.

• pipebomb
• survivor series
• Adam Blampied
• wwe

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