Working Man’s WWE TV Review: 12/27/20 – 1/2/21

It’s a new year. You know what that means.

Anything Worth Watching?

Matches: NXT North American Title: Johnny Gargano [c] vs. Leon Ruff (NXT 12/30/20), Daniel Bryan & Otis w/ Chad Gable vs. Cesaro & Shinsuke Nakamura (SmackDown 1/1/21)

Promos: Big E’s Open Challenge (SmackDown 1/1/21)

Angles: No

Wrestlers: Johnny Gargano, Big E, Roman Reigns

Key Trends: RAW is Bad, Happy New Year

RAW (12/28/20)

This was pretty bad, which is kind of RAW’s thing.

The Brodie Lee references were nice. T-Bar took a bump that was scary. Randy Orton setting Alexa Bliss on fire to end the year was neither.

Random AJ Styles/Elias match and The Miz got Money in the Bank back too.

Rating: 1/10

NXT (12/30/20)

Up against AEW’s Brodie Lee Tribute Show, it was not likely there was going to be much here. There was not.

Fandango jumped off a tall thing and Pete Dunne/Roderick Strong was pretty good. So was Johnny Gargano vs. Leon Ruff for the NXT North American Title, where part-time Johnny gave young Leon a whole main event match.

Karrion Kross and Damian Priest basically had a whole falls count anywhere match together that appeared to make Scarlett horny.

A week before their big match, a video package revealed that Rhea Ripley Raquel González are actually besties.

Talk about a big week for someone: Gran Metalik pinned The Miz on RAW (I didn’t mention it because they probably won’t again), then he and Lince Dorado showed up on NXT to challenge Santos Escobar and maybe enter the cruiserweight division. Sure would help out.

Io Shirai, The Undisputed Era, Shotzi Blackheart, Io Shirai, and Austin Theory won year-end awards too. These were better.

Rating: 3/10

MAIN EVENT (12/30/20)

Back to two matches now. Nikki Cross and RECKONING actually had a rough go of it, the usual eh Main Event match but more off spots than usual. Akira Tozawa and Angel Garza kind of went extra hard though, a light Main Event Match Worth Watching with extra cool counters and physicality.

Rating: 3/10

NXT UK (12/31/20)

The New Year’s edition of NXT UK was filled with NXT UK superstars wishing a happy New Year’s over Zoom. There’s a 10% chance you should check out Sam Gradwell‘s silly tribute to 2020.

They aired two matches from earlier in the year: Gallus vs. Lorcan & Burch for the Tag Titles from 2/13 (crap) and Tyler Bate/Jordan Devlin from TakeOver: Blackpool II (good).

Tyson T-Bone‘s figure collection made a return too.

Rating: 2/10

SMACKDOWN (1/1/21)

This show has Roman Reigns and the wrestling was a little cooler than usual.

Sasha/Bianca vs. Bayley/Carmella and Bryan/Otis vs. Cesaro/Nakamura were a pair of TV tags with higher work than usual, and I dig the side-story of Bryan training with Chad Gable for the Rumble.

Big E‘s Easter Egg-filled promo for Brodie Lee was tremendous, Sonya Deville is back, and Kevin Owens got thrown off the Thunderdome.

Rating: 5/10

205 LIVE (1/1/21)

It looks like Curt Stallion‘s shot at the Cruiserweight Title has been bumped to sometime later next month, but he’s A Part of the Crew now and teamed with Ever-Rise against Ariya Daivari & The Bollywood Boyz in a decent just-let-the-year-actually-end type of match.

Mansoor vs. Jake Atlas opened and was similar.

Rating: 3/10