When Monday Night Raw first moved to Netflix, most fans celebrated the move, as they felt it would allow WWE to at least occasionally explore some more mature storylines or have some more intense matches. More than a year into the partnership, however, it’s increasingly obvious that’s not happening. In fact, the opposite might be true. This week’s Raw, as an example, saw the best line from the live show edited out of the broadcast, and I still don’t fully understand why.
The line in question was delivered by the returning Becky Lynch. She’s been off television for awhile, but she made a surprise appearance on Monday to confront Women’s World Champion Liv Morgan and set up a potential feud. During their verbal confrontation on the microphone, she hit Liv with a series of insults. She criticized her for only defending her title once in a hundred days. She told her she wasn’t even the best women’s champion in Judgment Day since Raquel Rodriguez won the Intercontinental Championship, and as she was walking away, she hit her with the coldest line of all…
Hell, you’re not even the greatest women’s champion that slept with Dominik Mysterio.
That little crack obviously refers to the fact that prior to being Morgan’s on-screen boyfriend and valet, Mysterio was Rhea Ripley’s on-screen boyfriend and valet. The crowd ate the line up like it was a CM Punk Pipebomb insult, and to be honest, I ate it up while sitting on my couch at home too. I let out an audible gasp and sat up in my chair and pointed at the TV like I was doing the Leonardo DiCaprio meme. I wasn’t the only one either. Video of the segment trended widely on social media, and a bunch of tweets featuring the quote got thousands of likes.
Apparently WWE or Netflix or both didn’t like it though because now, if you stream the episode, that last little zinger is completely cut out. It’s not even censored. It’s just been removed from the broadcast in some weird attempt to pretend it didn’t happen. But why? WWE dropped an unedited version on social media after it happened, which is still available, and it's at almost a million views.
WWE has also gone a lot further than this and kept the material in the broadcasts. Cody Rhodes and The Rock have both dropped F-Bombs over the last few years, and they've just been bleeped. Other performers have made thousands of jokes in the history of the company that were way more graphic, and yet, this little zinger about a character’s sexuality history that you could get away with in a PG movie is suddenly too much?
I’m not one of those people who think WWE should go back to the Attitude Era or start gearing its programming exclusively to adults. I loved wrestling as a little kid, and I love it as a dude who is almost forty. I don’t want to shut out kids by having characters swear every two seconds, but neutering the product of every adult reference and joke isn’t the way forward either. The goal should be to produce programming that works on multiple levels. That means you need Danhausen-type stories that work for little kids, and you need segments that throw in the occasional off-color joke.
Maybe Becky Lynch didn’t get permission to use the line before she went out there. Maybe she went off script, and Triple H and company weren’t happy about it. Even if that’s the case though, it went over extremely well with fans. The wrestling business is a conversation between the booker, the performer and the fans, and if the fans are responding to something, it’s the booker’s job to deliver more of whatever that is, not pretend it didn't happen.
Triple H, Bruce Prichard and company have been around long enough to understand that if something works, it works, and given the negative buzz right now and sluggish ticket sales at SummerSlam, they should be particularly focused on rolling with anything that works. I don’t know who made the decision to cut this line, but as a fan, it doesn’t sit right with me. Everyone watching the product should be mature enough to handle that joke, and WWE should be mature enough to accept the consequences and not pretend like it didn’t happen.
