These reviews were once called “Bang for Your Buck,” but because of the Network, the value of an individual show is less based on “getting your money’s worth” than “how much does having access to something like this make me want to renew my subscription?”
Which means that in addition to taking into account things like major character shifts, definitive conclusions (which are different from clean finishes) and spots that don’t make their way to Raw or Smackdown Live, it’ll also focus on “how many times would I rewatch this”, “would I show this to non-fans as a reason why wrestling is worth watching” and “how different was this historically?”
Each match is rated on a sliding scale between +1 and -1 with +1 being “Show the match to non-wrestling fans as the first free hit of a drug,” and things that make you reevaluate being a fan — literally stop watching because you are so upset by the result — earning up to a -1 score.
I’ll be using what I said from the Fantasy Booking: Money in the Bank (2018) preview to see how close I was to predicting what would happen and whether or not it lived up to my pre-established expectations. You know, like an adult.
The Bludgeon Brothers (C) defeat Luke Gallows & Karl Anderson to retain Smackdown Tag Team Titles
The Hope: A sincerely competitive match between three talented performers and Erick Rowan, which is worked like an actual tag match and not the closest approximation of a singles match that they could get in a tag team concept. Also, preferably something longer than their six minutes matches the last two times the Bludgeon Brothers were on PPV.
Given that this match was A) on the pre-show and B) it was almost verbatim the same match as the last three PPVs, I’ll take this time to plug this week’s How Wrestling Explains the World on the Golden State Warriors:
