As I mentioned in the previous blog, I'm planning on revisiting some other subjects than Marvel and DC films in the months ahead on this blog (don't worry, the film reviews will kick back in soon enough as well). I've covered wrestling before in this blog and thought with series 1 of World of Sport having just finished on ITV, it'd be a good opportunity to have a look back at what worked, what didn't and where the show goes from here.
When WOS made it's comeback at the end of 2016, I have to admit to enjoying the pilot special and thought it had a lot of potential. Unfortunately, the series seemed to suffer quite a lot of setbacks in between that first episode and the first series proper starting with the show seeming to be forever delayed and bogged down with red tape. WWE launched their WWE UK division, seemingly worried about losing a potential market although after an impressive initial tournament, that too seems to have been lying in the doldrums for a while with only a handful of stars (Tyler Bate, Pete Dunne) being utilised. However, with a UK WWE show apparently now in the pipeline and a lot of stars moving between the two formats in the 18 month gap, it did mean that the roster starting series 1 had gone through quite a few changes with the likes of Dave Mastiff, El Ligero and Zack Gibson not returning for the series. However, with some canny new additions including Will Ospreay, Kay Lee Ray, Joe Hendry, Martin Kirby and Rampage Brown plus a solid foundation for the roster including Davey Boy Smith Jr, Grado, Viper and Sha Samuels and the introduction of Stu Bennett (aka Wade Barrett) and So Cal Val to replace the departed Jim Ross on commentary, the potential was definitely there.
I'm gonna say it straight off - to me the series was a bit of a disappointment. The wrestling itself was generally on the right side of watchable but it did seem a lot of the time like they were simply trying to see how many gimmick matches they could tick off in ten episodes. Ladder match? Tick. Loser leaves town? Tick. Submission? Tick. Handicap match? Tick. Mixed tag? Tick. By the time of the near-inexplicable Buzzer Battle Match in Week 9 which was almost Vince Russo-like in how convoluted it was (to wit: it starts off as a sort of Battle Bowl meets War Games minus the cage meets Survivor Series match with each team getting a random new member every few minutes and then turns into a battle royale once we're down to eight wrestlers who haven't been eliminated, it turns into a battle royale), you just found yourself thinking "Look, just cut the gimmicks and have some straight-up matches guys!" To make things worse, the big final Championship match in the last episode was just ridiculously overbooked with a totally unnecessary amount of run-ins, ref bumps etc that it just didn't feel like a decent pay-off for the previous ten weeks of emotional investment.
In fact, the Loser Leaves Town storyline between Adam Maxted and Nathan Cruz was pretty much a textbook example of the bookers rushing storylines needlessly. The pair were a tag team for the first 4-5 episodes until Cruz turned on Maxted after they lost in the final of the tag team championship tournament. The next week (!) the pair faced off in a Loser Leaves Town match with Cruz leaving and being "out of the company" only to return two weeks later in the Buzzer Battle clusterfumble to cost Maxted the match. If the bookers knew this storyline would have to be rushed through so quickly then they just shouldn't have gone with it and tried to string it out a bit more. As it was, it felt like something WCW would have done in their dying days and that really isn't what you want to be aiming for...
It's a shame because the continual reliance on gimmick matches to me came at the expense of decent character development which also hurt a lot of the top-of-the-card guys. With the exceptions of Smith and Bennett from WWE and Grado and, for those who remember the British Boot Camp series, Kay Lee and Rampage from TNA (plus the odd guest appearance from the likes of Doug Williams and Moose, who appeared as a babyface helping Sysum the week that TNA chose to give him his long overdue heel turn - talk about bad timing!), a lot of the names would probably have been unknown to those who don't keep a close eye on the UK wrestling scene and therefore needed their characters to be drawn out to make the audience care for them which WOS by and large just didn't do which is pretty much tantamount to shooting yourself in the foot when it comes to your promotion being successful.
A case in point is the company's top babyface Justin Sysum. Given how hard they pushed the guy (and make no mistake he's a decent wrestler), you'd have thought they'd have devoted some time to a couple of promo videos or interviews to build up his story, explain his motivation and give us a reason to cheer from him. Instead, he was essentially portrayed as "that bloke who wears a centurion's robe to the ring and keeps getting messed about by Rampage".
Speaking of Rampage, I thought he was booked pretty poorly as well. Since when did not giving your champion any mic time seem like a sensible booking policy? Yes, I know WWE did this with Brock Lesnar last year. He had Paul Heyman as his mouthpiece. Although Sha Samuels did a reasonably good job as being Rampage's mouthpiece, the dynamic of him being Rampage's goon (who lost more matches than he won) rather than an out and out manager in the Heyman/Cornette/Heenan style which meant that his bragging just didn't have the same effect it would've done. The thing is that, as anyone who saw him on TNA's British Boot Camp will know, Rampage is actually competent enough on the mic to be able to cut his own promos so why they took this approach with him is baffling as it felt as if it completely stunted his character.
To be brutally honest, I don't think the three-person commentary team worked very well either. Alex Shane was generally a decent play-by-play guy in the Mike Tenay/'80s Vince McMahon mould but it often felt like his two colour commentators So Cal Val and Stu Bennett just kept getting in each others' way. Both are decent commentators in their own right but a two-person booth would have just worked a bit better here and made things feel a bit less cluttered in my opinion.
And yet...and yet, I do get the impression that given a bit of time to iron out the kinks that WOS does have potential. They've got a very good roster with the likes of Smith, Ospreay, Rampage, Sysum, Samuels, Robbie X, Joe Hendry, Martin Kirby, Kip Sabian, Nathan Cruz, BT Gunn, Kay Lee Ray, Viper, Liam Slater and Gabriel Kidd on board and when the wrestlers were allowed to kick loose without the gimmicks getting in the way (Smith and Ospreay had a great match in the first episode, the feud between Kirby and Hendry was never less than entertaining, Grado was always fun to watch and the cruiserweights like Slater, Kidd and X put on some entertaining aerial battles (though rather like WWE and TNA, they could do with getting away from the whole mindset of treating these guys as an acrobat sideshow and simply having them fight the same people week after week or, even worse, just having them all get crushed by the giant Crater).
So what does the future hold for WOS? Well, the fact that in the last few weeks of its run it went from a 5:30 prime time Saturday teatime slot to being buried in the 3:30 mid-afternoon slot doesn't bode well but with a tour being announced for next spring, I hope that it's a sign that ITV are prepared to give it another chance. The first series may have been far from perfect but the series deserves a chance to develop a bit and find its own niche. Not least because if the UK televised wrestling scene is left solely with WWE's Brit promotion it's gonna make things just a bit boring (although the news that Progress have been given their own cable show is definitely an interesting development). We shall see...
