TV Review: WWE's NXT is A-OK

The Miz speaks with his "trainee" Daniel Bryan.

When the WWE decided to cancel its ECW promotion and replace it with a Tough Enough-esque reality show, I didn't have high hopes for the new program. Frankly, it sounded kind of weird and gimmicky and stupid, like the entire Divas division and past promotions giving away $1 million to viewers.

Lo and behold though, NXT has actually been pretty decent in its initial two episodes, as it has given a chance for raw wrestlers and performers new to the WWE scene to get some television exposure. The show's focus on just eight performers certainly helps, as does the inclusion of established pros like Chris Jericho and The Miz to help them out with promo work.

In my opinion, there have been two stand-out performers on the show so far. The first one, Daniel Bryan, shouldn't be that surprising to anyone who follows wrestling regularly. He has been wrestling regularly for years, mostly for independent promotions and Ring of Honor, under the name Bryan Danielson. While the WWE has downplayed this, acknowledging only that he has been wrestling for a decade, his polish in the ring comes through as compared to the other raw talents on the show. In the debut episode, he almost pinned World Heavyweight champion Chris Jericho, and except for a botch on a springboard in the second episode, he has been near perfect in his ring action.

(Side note: The Miz is Bryan's mentor, and he is shockingly good on both this show and regular WWE programming. Seriously. Bill Simmons mentioned it in a column or chat the other week, but we are at the point where The Miz is now probably the most successful Real World graduate. Simply stunning. He will probably be a world champion within the next three years; he is dynamite on the microphone, like a young Chris Jericho, and his ring-work is now very good as opposed to just passable.)

Justin Gabriel also impressed in his tag match, which pitted him and Matt Hardy against William Regal and his hick trainee, Skip Sheffield. Gabriel is a big guy, but he hit a 450-degree splash from the top rope after Hardy laid out Regal with his finisher. He didn't hit it as easily as Evan Bourne nails the Shooting Star Press, which worried me a bit, but still, the finisher has definite star potential.

The other wrestlers featured prominently in the second episode, which I saw all of, were a mixed bag to me. At best, Sheffield seems like a hick comedy act; Santino Marella with muscles. Darren Young is a more athletic, thinner version of ECW and Smackdown flame-out Ricky Ortiz. David Otunga has a monstrous physique, and he clearly has an "all-star" pedigree in that his fiancee is apparently Jennifer Hudson; the WWE has a weakness for celebrity connections like that. However, he is clearly the rawest performer of the bunch.

Overall, NXT was a fairly entertaining hour of TV, and I'll check back with it from time to time - It had some fresher storylines and more wrestling than Raw and TNA Impact, which is kind of damning it with faint praise right now. However, it lacks the "pop" of the Smackdown storylines, at least in its two initial episodes.

Grade: B

Stuff you're probably not interested in: WWE Bragging Rights review

[Left] Chris Jericho pictures are always appropriate.

I wasn't really sure what to write about today, but then I realized that I haven't written about professional wrestling in a good, long time. Don't read on if you still want to watch WWE's Bragging Rights! While I realize most of you aren't wrestling fans at all, maybe you'll find this interesting anyway.

Opening match: Miz vs. Morrison was a fun match with some good action, even if I didn't like the finish, which was Miz pinning Morrison clean. Sure, he did a kind of dirty move by shoving him during Starship Pain, but I'm not sure what the finish accomplished. I can't see the Miz getting pushed further just yet, and he get the best of Morrison in their last confrontation (the draft), so I thought Morrison would be going over.

Diva tag team match: The diva tag match was interesting until the finish, when it looked like Beth Phoenix and Melina screwed up. Maybe that was just my perspective though. I did like the sort of odd tension between Phoenix and her fellow heel, Michelle McCool. They would make for an interesting heel stable if it weren't for the Beautiful People in TNA, of which they would be a clear copy of.

World Heavyweight Championship fatal fourway: This match for the WHC wasn't that great. I'm believing the Internet reports about Taker being seriously diminished in terms of health more and more, because this match only went about 10 minutes. Undertaker won after a tombstone piledriver, and after Rey and Batista broke up each other's pins during the match.

After the match was over, Batista savagely attacked Rey, instantly turning him heel. While I think Batista turning heel is good for his character, which was getting stale as a babyface, I don't like it from an overall standpoint. This means Punk is on his way out of the title picture after the next match / short program with Taker, barring a huge upset, setting up Batista vs. Taker around Royal Rumble time. They did have good matches in 2007 and 2008, but it still feels stale to me. Also, given Taker's health concerns, who knows if that can continue?

Seven on seven, Team Raw vs. Team Smackdown: This was better than I thought it would be, although I was annoyed to see Kofi Kingston take the pin. I also thought he went out pretty weakly - All he got was a chokeslam from Show, and about 30 seconds passed before Jericho actually got the fall. At least have Jericho do a Lionsault or something, because the Chokeslam is more of a secondary finisher for Show now, and a rising star like Kofi shouldn't be pinned on it.

Iron Man match: Finally, this was surprisingly good. It looked like Cena got legit busted open, all the pinfalls made it interesting, and they did a good job of portraying Orton's utterly psychotic nature. His look of madness in the last two minutes was incredible, although with the finish, I'm not sure where they go from here. Maybe have Orton get even more ruthless? Just have him beat the crap out of people backstage for absolutely no reason, until even Legacy / Priceless (and specifically Ted Jr.) feels the need to stand up for him.

And with the win, there is now absolutely nothing for Cena to do. DX looks like they're going to be busy with JeriShow, any kind of match with Orton would be stale, and the other heels on the roster - Swagger, the Miz, Masters - don't really seem to be anywhere near Cena's league as a competitor.

Maybe the WWE will actually take my advice and go with a Kofi Kingston vs. Cena match, face vs. face, for the PPV. Or maybe they'll go old school and have Cena and Taker each lead a Survivor Series team at the PPV. You could the GMs pick each team, and Cena's team would be faces - Cena, Kofi, Evan Bourne and MVP. Smackdown would be a mix, maybe Taker, Morrison, Punk and Ziggler / Estrada. To provide an incentive for the winning team, all the surviving team members would be entered into a match for the championship belt on their brand.

At some point, you have Punk get Taker DQed, followed by Taker "removing" Punk from the match, setting up their program for the next PPV. At that point, maybe Morrison is the only guy left, and he fights valiantly against the remaining members before getting pinned by Cena eventually. They shake hands at the end, everyone is happy, the end.

p.s. I was disappointed that there was nothing from ECW on this show. What gives? It's got the best wrestling week in and week out on WWE programming now.

And also, the Chris Jericho picture is from here.

The Monday night Raw doldrums

Unrelated to the rest of this post but always important to mention - Chris Jericho is the man.

I shamefully enjoy professional (fake) wrestling, which normally surprises others and forces me to mount an awkward defense of my interest. Yes, it's fake, but so is everything on television. Yes, it's a bit like a soap opera, and yeah, it is kind of homoerotic that guys are clutching each other, and yes, that's weird. But there is something oddly entertaining about it to me, to the point where I've never really been able to stop, even when the programming is in a down cycle.

I think there is something primal in wrestling that gets pretty much every guy interested in it at some point. I was substituting for an elementary school gym class last week, and casually commented on a CM Punk shirt a kid was wearing. This was a bad decision from a class control standpoint, but good for me personally, because soon every kid was asking me about the wrestlers I knew and (somewhat comically, somewhat scarily) trying to put their friends into the Go To Sleep (you put the person up on your shoulders, then swing them down toward a knee to the face).

All the kids I knew growing up watched wrestling, but pretty much all of them dropped it as we got to middle school and high school. I didn't really advertise that I watched it, but it never came up in casual conversation, except for a few times when "Stone Cold" Steve Austin was fighting with The Rock and the corporation and Mick Foley (1998, 1999). From conversations in college, when I grew a little less ashamed about my habit, I found out that there weren't really many people watching it in secret like I was.

Enough with this trip down memory lane, though - The current product leaves something to be desired. The most pressing issue to me is what has happened to Monday Night Raw. This week's episode was OK, with a bloody, intense confrontation between Randy Orton and Ric Flair to hype up this Sunday's meeting between Orton and Batista. However, even the hilarious Santino Marella and a solid MVP-Kofi Kingston match couldn't keep the hour I watched from dragging a bit.

After the draft, it seemed like Raw would become the dominant brand, because of all the star power - HHH, Batista, Orton, HBK, The Big Show, John Cena - in the top tier. Oddly though, this has made most of the booking predictable. After a slight push to MVP, involving him in the Orton-HHH--Batista-McMahon family angle, he is back to the midcard, in a feud with the pedestrian William Regal and Matt Hardy. All of the big names force the WWE to book formulaically at top, since HHH and Batista and Orton aren't going to be losing often to the likes of MVP and Kofi Kingston.

Meanwhile, Smackdown and ECW lost a lot of their marquee talent, and both have been great since the draft. Because there aren't really any talent "tiers" on the shows, the only focus is on good angles and good matches. Both of the shows, and to a lesser extent Superstars, are normally my focus in a given week as opposed to the normal flagship, Raw.