WWE NXT Report 2/23/10

The FanHouse WWE NXT Report is a recap of what went down before SyFy canceled the show and replaced it with a modern, steampunk adaptation of Hansel and Gretel and is for entertainment purposes only. Warning: the rookies on this show are both "wild" and "young." Reader discretion is advised.


Quick Results
(for those keeping score at home)

1. Christian and rookie Heath Slater d. Carlito and rookie Michael Tarver
2. Rookie David Otunga with R-Truth d. rookie Darren Young with The Straight Edge Society
3. World Heavyweight Champion Chris Jericho d. rookie Daniel Bryan


Lengthy, Verbose Results
(where I start marking pretty hard)

- Welcome to the first episode of WWE NXT, World Wrestling Entertainment's first (second) venture into reality television. The concept of the show is simple: it is exactly like ECW, except you don't have to listen to Tiffany talk. No, the concept is that eight WWE Pros are put in charge of eight rookies who are vaguely competing against (I think) each other for an undefined chance to make it in WWE. As the show opens we get a look at our eight rookies: two tough looking black guys, five hairless guys smirking and rubbing their hands together like so much Renee Dupree, and the American Dragon Bryan Danielson. Your announcers are Michael "I only watch joshi from the early 80s" Cole and Josh Matthews.

Personal note: I really wish they'd put Kaval (formerly known as Low Ki, associatively known as Senshi) on this show and had CM Punk mentor him. "I am a three time World Heavyweight Champion. Last weekend you main evented Cleveland All Pro against J.T. Lightning and had to take it home early because the local punk bands were getting restless. Lesson one: stop burning bridges."

Secondary personal note: Holy crap, Bryan Danielson and CM Punk are on the same show. The week they finally run into each other my report is going to be nothing but exclamation points.

- We get right to what the Internet is so mad about: The Miz introduces his rookie Daniel Bryan (Danielson), puts himself over, and continues to beat us over the head with the fact that Bryan has no charisma and is boring. I know what they're doing and unlike a lot of people unline (especially fans of Dragon) I like it ... but it's a slippery slope. You're giving a lot of people a talking point they will never get rid of, like when Stone Cold Steve Austin brought out a pillow and went to sleep during a Lance Storm promo. Some people still don't know who raised the briefcase at the 1999 King of the Ring. Be careful when you're giving them the benefit of the doubt.

Miz sends Bryan out to the ring to cut a promo and die in front of the live crowd. Bryan heads out and does perfectly fine, because he has been doing this for ten years, and because sometimes people make judgments without knowing what they're talking about. Example: Sheamus is very pale, and therefore can never be good.

Bryan apologizes to the fans for The Miz being his mentor and says he wishes he'd gotten William Regal instead. This brings out the Miz proper, who puts Bryan over as a submission specialist but wonders how he's going to get over in WWE. It's interesting that the people on this show are operating under the trappings of scripted pro wrestling but are still worried about face/heel alignments and "getting over." It's like when wrestlers want to wrestle each other to "have a good match." You guys are supposed to be real people doing this for your real job, shouldn't you be worried about winning matches? Suspend my disbelief, guys.

Miz slaps Bryan across the face for standing up to him, causing me to go "oh ho ho" and move around a little bit on my couch because this is the first time I've been really excited about WWE TV in a while. Bryan doesn't retaliate, saying that there will come a time when he slaps the Miz back. Nobody starts a "you're gonna get your f**king head kicked in" hooligan chant or anything, but this is GREAT, and no amount of Matt Hardy can take it away.

- In the backstage area, your NXT host Matt Striker interviews Daniel Bryan. Bryan says that he isn't embarrassed, and that he slaps a lot harder than The Miz. Striker tells him that he's going to have to show humility and respect to Miz if he wants to make it as a star in WWE, and that he admires his confidence. Second question: How does it feel to have an entire hour devoted to getting you over?

Match 1: Tag Team Match
Christian and rookie Heath Slater [total combined weight 469 lbs.] vs. Carlito and rookie Michael Tarver [total combined weight 476 lbs.]

Carlito introduces us to Michael Tarver. I saw Tarver wrestle in Cleveland as Tyrone Evans and put on a pretty great MMA rules match with Eddie Kingston for Absolute Intense Wrestling, but remember him mostly as the guy with the some of the worst strikes I'd ever seen from CAPW. Here he is being billed as a man who can knock you out with those strikes in 1.9 seconds. Maybe he's gotten better. Imagine if people had to sell Shawn Michaels' chops like they were getting hit by Kensuke Sasaki.

Christian's rookie is Heath Slater, a "one man rock band" who loves to party and even more to do the Wayne from Wayne's World hair-over-the-ear gesture. About halfway through this match I go "oh, I get it. Christian Slater." They should call their tag team Hard Rain. Christian and Carlito do a miniaturized version of their match from Raw involving the rookies, and Christian catches Tarver off guard with the Killswitch for the duke.

Winner: Christian and Heath Slater [Killswitch]

After the match, we get the hard sell on Heath Slater loving to showboat. It doesn't do much to disprove that "arrogant young hairless man" archetype I've been complaining about. Slater looks like Lance Cade and Jesse of Jesse and Festus fame had a baby. He kinda wrestles like it, too. Carlito should mentor Tarver now by not having either of them be on television for several months. Hey, the mentors should play to their strengths.

Match 2: Rookie vs. Rookie
Darren Young [255 lbs., from Union City, New Jersey] vs. David Otunga [240 lbs., from Hollywood, California]

David Otunga is the real life fiancé of Grammy and Academy Award-winning actress Jennifer Hudson, has stars shaved into his hair, and cuts a promo with great egotistical aplomb about how he is a cross between Triple H, The Rock, and John Cena. More accurately he is a cross between Montel Vontavious Porter, Monty Brown, and Black Dynamite. He is mentored by WWE Superstar R-Truth, who mentors him intimately by rapping his own themesong as they walk to the ring and ignoring the match completely.

Darren Young is ... okay, stay with me here. You know when you FIRST got a Smackdown game and you wanted to create a wrestler, but you weren't any good at the CAW mode so you ended up basically making a black John Cena with orange Dragonball hair? Darren Young is exactly THAT guy. It's like he walked out of that commercial where all the create-a-wrestlers are having breakfast. He is only of note because he is a "South Beach party boy" being mentored by CM Punk and the Straight Edge Society. He is so bad I had to go to WWE.com to remember his name.

The match starts when Otunga whips Young into the ropes, delivers the sloppiest Ron Simmons spinebuster this side of an IWA-MS trash can spot, and pins him. That was it, that was the entire match, and somebody made it look terrible. I'm gonna go ahead and blame it on Darren Young. CM Punk's earlier promo of "I don't understand why I'm on this show" is vindicated, and he just kind of shrugs and walks away.

Winner: David Otunga [spine and half of body buster]

- We get a replay of events that took place earlier in the hour (because Nitro is on on the other channel, and they don't want us to flip) involving The Miz slapping Daniel Bryan in the face. He is in our main event tonight, and my blood starts moving around and I'm about one "I've got till FIVE referee" away from reverting back to that day in Cleveland where I was so amped for Dragon I shouted for him to literally murder Kenny King in front of me.

- After the break, the Raw Rebound posts up and recaps the Mr. McMahon/John Cena situation from Monday night. Every time Vince calls him "Mr. Cena" I want John to respond with "Mr. Cena is my DAD'S name!" The Wrestlemania main event right now is John Cena vs. Batista for the WWE Championship, but the way things are going it might end up being Steve Corino vs. BJ Whitmer, who the hell knows.

Match 3: Internet Darling Dream Match
Chris Jericho © [226 lbs., from Calgary, Alberta, Canada] vs. Daniel Bryan [202 lbs., from Aberdeen, Washington]

Jericho is introduced by his rookie Wade Barrett, an Englishman who looks like Simon Diamond and who has the gimmick of wearing a jacket without putting his arms through the sleeves. Man, it's tough to be from England in the WWE. Dynamite Kid is in a wheelchair, Davey Boy Smith had to roll around in dog poop and died falling into a trap door, William Regal had to drink tea with somebody's pee in it and now this guy wearing his f**king jacket all stupid.

In what may be a subtle touch (but is more likely a production error), Daniel Bryan is billed from Las Vegas on the screen but announced from his actual hometown of Aberdeen, Washington. Maybe the Miz's mentoring idea is to give him a gambling gimmick. That'd give him personality, put him in a cowboy hat. Wait, there's already a rookie in a cowboy hat, and that guy has TONS OF ABS. I know, put him in a scuba suit.

We have to sit through like eight commercial breaks in a row before the match starts, but when it does, oh man is it great. Bryan upholds the CODE OF HONOR by offering a handshake to Jericho, and the two go into an awesome exchange of strikes including a running forearm in the corner from Dragon. I can't believe I'm watching this on television. It's not even impaired by the weird camera angles they've been using all night, where they don't use a hard camera and sometimes people disappear into the corners. Bryan does exactly what he needed to do to make an impression in WWE: be himself. He dodges Jericho with his corner backflip, has the crowd he supposedly isn't good enough to work in front of eating out of his hands thinking Jericho is going to tap out to an ankle lock, and flies through the ropes with an intensity and spark that NOBODY has right now with a suicide dive that ends with him kidneys first against the front of the announcers table. Shades of... wait, who was that guy? Wait, don't call it a suicide dive, call it something else.

Michael Cole loses it in an insufferable but obviously purposeful rant against internet fans and anyone who thinks non-WWE wrestling is wrestling. He says that Bryan is boring (again, despite the fact that he's been proving all night that he isn't... bad talking point, bad) and that he's "never heard of him." Easily infuriated ROHbots break about 45 webcams trying to vlog about it, but it's funny to hear Cole get bent out of shape about indy wrestlers as though they were the Little Rascals, ruining his poshly decorated mansion with their antics. I want Cole to get madder and madder about the indys while getting more specific every week.

Cole: "And you know something JOSH, these DIMESTORE nobodies think that by main eventing in some run down storage unit in front of eight people, seven of whom are their relatives, makes you a WWE Superstar, UH UH, being a WWE Superstar takes years of practice and a lifetime of training! And furthermore, who does Pinkie Sanchez think he is using the inverted Chikara Special, a move OBVIOUSLY taught to him by Claudio Castagnoli, to trick the tecnicos and win Cibernetico?"

Josh: "uh"

Jericho wins the match (as he should) with a Codebreaker and a Liontamer, and Daniel Bryan becomes a top trend on Twitter and looks like a million bucks.

Winner: Chris Jericho [Torture Walls of Jericho]

Post match, The Miz beats Bryan until he's red in the face for embarrassing him. First order of business: get the good rookies their own entrance themes, so people can cheer this guy without having to lose their Pavlovian reponse to AWESAAAAAAAAMMMMMM.

What the show accomplished: Getting Daniel Bryan over. The seven other rookies and about five of the pros look like confused hacks compared to Dragon. That's overstating it, but I'm pretty sure Carlito has never moved that quickly or accurately in his life. At the risk of fantasy booking, there's no way Bryan wins this. The show will get him over more and more until he doesn't need it, and he'll be an instrumental part of the midcard for as long as they want to use him. Give the "First NXT Winner!" title to one of those lipsmacking guys in tribal trunks who need it.

What the show didn't accomplish: Making me ever want to see Darren Young again. Somebody put Ricky Ortiz, Mark Jindrak, Orlando Jordan into a blender. Stop giving me guys like this. Seriously. Stop it. They should've named him "Orlando Pippen."

The gist: The first episode of NXT is a definite success. I was interested in the entire hour, and if we've got to lose my beloved niche-ECW for something, at least we lost it for this. Next week we get to meet the rookies of William Regal and Matt Hardy, and we find out what Matt Hardy possibly has to teach someone. "Do you have a brother? No? Okay, can you make your own clothes? No? Do you have an ex-girlfriend? Oh, awesome, let's go into the forest and shoot posters of her with our handguns."

See you NXT week!