WWE Survivor Series 2022 Review

November 26th 2022 was the date of WWE’s Survivor Series: War-Games, the first introduction of the Dusty Rhodes/Dory Funk Jr brainchild gimmick match on WWE’s main roster. It was also a pleasing continuation of WWE’s trend toward Saturday night PPVs, always a boon for those of us outside of the U.S. who are getting too old to brave a Monday morning at work following a 1am start to a wrestling show - though, in the interest of context, I watched this show hungover on a Sunday afternoon, the day after a wedding. I mention this because one’s mental state and the circumstances under one which approaches a show can be as much of an influence on how enjoyable it is as anything booked on the card - Wrestlemania and the Royal Rumble may be underwhelming, but as I usually watch them in pleasant company, it’s a more overall positive experience, while staying up until the dawn chorus to watch a WWE live event on my own usually means I’m a fairly demanding consumer, all things considered. This was also the second of the traditional “Big Four” WWE pay-per-views of the Triple H era.

That is, one has to question, if Survivor Series can truly be considered one of the “Big Four”. For all its history and longevity, it’s been something of an afterthought for years, no longer a marquee event, nor the occasion when you can reliably assume that the first glimmers of the “road to Wrestlemania” will become visible. In recent years, it’s been reduced to a fairly tedious “brand vs. brand” gimmick show, where - some good matches aside - ordinary programming is paused, blood feuds and long-term rivalries cast aside, so that wrestlers can align themselves based on what colour T-shirt they’re wearing this month, and battle the other brand’s champions in matches that could be on paper dream matches, but are usually overbooked to within an inch of their life to protect the credibility of each brand’s champion. I’ve written in the past about the sheer laziness of the “brand warfare” concept as executed by WWE - unlike in the early days of WWE’s first brand split, there’s no stylistic distinction between RAW and Smackdown, nor are talent really synonymous with either show, so there’s no sense that an inter-brand match is giving us anything new or intriguing, and little effort has ever been made to add that extra storytelling spice. When there’s no discernible kayfabe benefit to winning a RAW vs. Smackdown match, what incentive is there for two men who were at each other’s throats the previous month to suddenly become tag team partners? A question like that shouldn’t make the match make less sense, it should be an opening to add additional layers to the story - would the management of RAW offer some motivation for their team to win, while the management of Smackdown threaten punishment if their team loses? Would the allure of title shots to a winning team be enough for individual members to overlook prior grudges and agree to work together? These are all simple questions and simple stories, yet consistently WWE failed to offer this.

So, thankfully, this year has done away with the “brand warfare” gimmick though, regrettably to an old traditionalist like me, has also done away with traditional Survivor Series elimination matches in the process. In its place are the two aforementioned War-Games matches, or at least the WWE take on the format, where the giant cage has no roof (all the better for elaborate high spots and cage dives), the individual team members are kept in shark cages prior to entering the match (at some point in the last decade, WWE went from 0 to 60 when it comes to shark cages, so I can only assume they were sold a job lot), and victory is by pinfall or submission, rather than the traditional “submission or surrender” stipulation.

The result of the focus on the War-Games stipulation is a show that, despite having two of that stipulation on the bill, comes across as a one-match card. While the provision of a women’s and men’s War Games match on the same card is admirable in terms of equality, there is a significant downside - a show chiefly built around a specific gimmick match has nowhere to go when the show opens with that same stipulation, and any high spots, big moves, weapon spots and so on in match one only serve to raise expectations for the main event which, when the two aren’t booked and produced in close comparison to one another, not only are those expectations unlikely to be met, there’s a constant risk of repetition.

In this case, the women’s War Games match featured plenty in the way of weapons and high spots - particularly a crossbody from the top of the cage courtesy of Nikki Cross, preceded by her entertainingly dangling her feet over the edge of the cage like an excitable toddler - but suffered for the worst of the War Games gimmick; with no possibility of the match ending before all participants had entered the match, there was limited tension generated, nor was there enough of a coherent story or through-thread to cover for that, while commentary did little to sell the risk, or the efficacy, of the moves in question, allowing them to be glossed over and moving on, or simply treating them with what you might call “what a moment” commentary calls rather than establishing the move’s impact on the story of the match (contrast to Jungle Boy’s elbow drop from the top of the cage at AEW Full Gear as the climactic note and emotional endpoint of his cage match with Luchasaurus, in a promotion that ordinary struggles with allowing individual big moments time to sink in). As a result, this match suffered in the way that too many WWE gimmick matches do - it was a perfectly acceptable, well worked match, but devoid of real heat, and with little reason for the audience to care. Like the interbrand Survivor Series matches of old, there were no discernible stakes, and it seemed reminiscent of gimmicked pay-per-views like Hell In A Cell, where a once iconic match is watered down by being booked because it’s on the calendar, rather than because the story specifically requires it. Rhea Ripley, as part of the Damage CTRL team, has spent most of the run-up to this PPV more embroiled in the ongoing AJ Styles/Finn Balor feud as a member of Judgment Day, and most recently was seen in a YouTube video assaulting Rey Mysterio at home on Thanksgiving, none of which has rationally built to her involvement in this main event. Nikki Cross, as the other “guest” member of the Damage CTRL team, has only recently reverted to her “crazy” gimmick after dropping the A.S.H. persona, and while the announce team talked up her anarchic presence and her desire to fight and cause chaos being stronger than her allegiance to the team, that never played into the match whatsoever. On the other team, there was no sense that the alliance between Becky Lynch and Bianca Belair - last seen as opponents at Summerslam - was in any way fractious or uneasy. I’m not suggesting that the match should have been entirely built on tired “can they co-exist?” tropes - particularly as an extended version of that trope was the primary question posed by the main event - but, like the “brand vs. brand” matches mentioned earlier, there was a suggestion of a deeper story or stories offered by this match that were not explored. The match also suffered from the effects of Triple H’s repeated use of “remember this?” as a crutch in his booking - of the participants in the match, two have returned after being released from WWE contracts, two returned from injury, one has reverted to an earlier gimmick, and one has been called up from NXT, all since Summerslam in August, with the most recent being Becky Lynch’s return from injury only the night before Survivor Series, and Mia Yim’s return to WWE (where, on the main roster prior to her release, she had only competed in a grand total of four matches, two of them on the watched-by-nobody Main Event, for a grand total of less than 15 minutes ring time). As a result, there was relatively limited time for audiences to have grown to develop a meaningful attachment to some of the wrestlers’ characters, and particularly to the dynamic between characters. The “remember this?” fallback is an easy recipe for a Pavlovian instant crowd reaction, but it’s unsustainable in the long-term, and no substitute for coherent storytelling.

The next match on the card was AJ Styles vs. Finn Balor - astonishingly only the second ever singles match between the two - in another match that was perfectly acceptable, but repeatedly got in its own way. It was reminiscent of the Wrestlemania match between AJ Styles and Shinsuke Nakamura, that was built up and anticipated to be a dream match, but ended up disappointing most viewers when it became a midcard time filler culminating in a low blow; personally, given that the intention was to turn Nakamura heel, I rather enjoyed it as something of a conscious anti-climax, the heel robbing the audience of the “five star match” they were anticipating. In this instance, it was the extraneous involvement of the Judgement Day and The OC that risked overshadowing the match. While it’s far from impossible for a wrestling match to tell multiple stories at once, this was a match that aspired to tell the story of two former leaders of Bullet Club that had gone from friends to rivals - a story that could be told more convincingly in a post-Vince McMahon age, where Michael Cole has no qualms about actually saying the words “Bullet Club” on WWE pay-per-view events rather than obliquely alluding to “history in Japan”, and even namedropped Apollo 55, and both men’s title successes in NJPW. But alongside that story was the ongoing rivalry between Balor’s Judgement Day and AJ Styles and The OC (don’t call it that), thanks to the (remember this?) return of Gallows & Anderson to WWE last month. In execution, that meant some uneventful ringside brawling that did little to play into the broader story. As mentioned earlier, Dominik Mysterio - here at ringside in support of Balor - did huge numbers on YouTube in a video where he and Rhea Ripley assaulted his father Rey Mysterio at home for Thanksgiving, and while the commentators acknowledged this, there was no effort made to further capitalise on the viral success of that angle either by involving Rey in this match, or by furthering the portrayal of Dominik as a wrestler prepared to transgress boundaries of taste and do unforgivable things. As absurd as it may be to say, it could be argued that Dominik Mysterio currently has more momentum behind him and would be better served by a featured spot on pay-per-view than either AJ Styles or Finn Balor. While one would assume this is building to either a Dominik vs. Rey match at Wrestlemania, or an eventual reconciliation there between the two, and there’s plenty of time to get to that story, it feels odd to run a Thanksgiving Day angle and do nothing to capitalise on it at the PPV the same weekend and sold in part as a “Thanksgiving tradition” - indeed, despite being mentioned during the first two matches, no part of the footage of the assault on Rey Mysterio was played during the show. AJ Styles was eventually victorious - I don’t think the result really matters here, in terms of credibility or forward momentum for either wrestler, though I’d have rather seen Finn Balor win to, again, continue building heat around Judgement Day following the Mysterio family angle; it’s easy to picture a victorious Judgement Day bragging about having eliminated their rivals only to be interrupted by a returning Rey Mysterio.

Ronda Rousey vs. Shotzi Blackheart next, for the Smackdown Women’s Title. Not a lot to say about this match - it’s good to see Shotzi getting opportunities, and Shayna Baszler’s credibility being gradually rebuilt as a dangerous running buddy for Ronda Rousey, but the main takeaway from this match is how much Ronda Rousey has regressed as a professional wrestler since her debut, to the point that there were sequences here where even her grappling and matwork were confusingly shambolic, and an attempted DDT on the apron by Shotzi was doomed to failure from the beginning. Everything about Rousey’s work and presentation feels like a performer who has mentally clocked out, or else of a performer who others have clocked out around, with producers and agents no longer prepared to put in the groundwork of constructing sufficient smoke and mirrors around her to present her as a main event calibre wrestler. Above all else, some six years after the end of her UFC career, Ronda Rousey doesn’t just feel like a failed experiment in WWE, but like a shadow of the star she once was as one of the most recognisable fighters in the world. One assumes that efforts will be made to heat Rousey up for a major match at Wrestlemania, but it’s questionable whether she will ever be a viable special attraction again.

The United States Title was on the line next, in a Triple Threat match between champion Seth Rollins, Austin Theory, and Bobby Lashley, three men that seem to have been feuding in some capacity for months. Commentary’s best efforts to put Lashley over as newly dangerous and motivated following a loss to Brock Lesnar only served to remind me that Bobby Lashley had just lost to Brock Lesnar, and therefore wasn’t as unbeatable as the match endeavoured to make him appear. Austin Theory, meanwhile, I last saw looking like a complete idiot for cashing in his Money In The Bank contract for a United States Title match on the same night that Seth Rollins had already issued an open challenge to defend the belt, and losing regardless. Much has been said about Austin Theory’s supposed “burial” since Triple H took the reins of WWE, and it’s something I’ve always been sceptical of - Theory was signed to NXT during Triple H’s stewardship of that brand, and was a featured part of the show; if anything, the booking of Theory on the main roster under Triple H has been designed to give the impression of a break from the previous regime by creating distance between the new creative direction and the wrestler last publicly attached to Vince McMahon. Theory’s win here feels like an effort to make him a cowardly, undeserving champion in the Honky Tonk Man vein, but with WWE seemingly reluctant to allow heels to actually cheat or generate any real heat, it’s a role that’s unlikely to play dividends.

And, finally, the main event - The Bloodline vs. The Brawling Brutes. A pay-per-view main event payday for Ridge Holland.

While there were other stories underpinning this match - the ongoing rivalry between Drew McIntyre and Roman Reigns, between The Brawling Brutes and The Usos, and a revisiting of the feud between Kevin Owens and Roman Reigns - the crux of the story, and the selling point of the match, was the questioned allegiance of Sami Zayn; would he side with The Bloodline, or turn on them at the behest of his long-time best friend Kevin Owens? Conversely, could the Bloodline trust him, or would they kick him to the curb before he had the opportunity to turn on them? That story, of Sami Zayn’s continuing devotion to The Bloodline, and of Jey Uso’s reluctance to accept him as an ally, has repeatedly been the highlight of WWE television in recent weeks, turning what could have been a brief and one-note joke or stooge character into a genuinely compelling, fleshed out narrative that has seen some fans call for Sami Zayn to be the man to finally end Roman Reign’s epic championship run.

On this show, the story was furthered in a series of backstage segments that epitomised the worst of WWE’s approach to television. This may seem like nitpicking to those who started watching wrestling in the years that this was already the norm, but there are few things that annoy me more on wrestling TV shows than an “invisible cameraman” - given that we were seeing backstage conversations in Roman Reigns’ private locker room (which, at one point, Sami Zayn explicitly said only members of the Bloodline were permitted to enter), why was there a cameraman present? Why were the audience able to watch these conversations? Why was the show formatted to allow breaks for these supposedly spontaneous segments to take place? Why would master strategists like Roman Reigns and Paul Heyman allow their private conversations to be broadcast in this fashion? What’s more, the topic of Roman Reigns’ conversations with Jey Uso and with Sami Zayn was whether or not Sami Zayn had spoken to Kevin Owens on Smackdown the previous night - a question that Roman Reigns could easily have answered by watching Smackdown, and seeing the same conversation that the audience had watched. It’s an approach to storytelling that treats wrestling as soap opera rather than a live sporting event, and which actively insults the audience by not addressing the most obvious of questions. It is, like almost every failing of pro-wrestling storytelling, a symptom of the “it’s only wrestling” approach, that there’s no need to make the story or presentation make sense, because either the product or the audience don’t deserve it. That’s not to say that backstage segments shouldn’t be a part of wrestling, far from it, just that there are the slightest of steps that can be taken to make things make sense - whether that be using hidden camera footage in the style of the long-forgotten GTV angle, a camera backstage filming something that would logically be a scheduled part of the broadcast, like an interview segment, being interrupted by something else taking place nearby, or, in this case, given the ongoing story of conflicted allegiances, a cameraman could be paid off by one of the participants; Jey Uso looking to catch out Sami Zayn, Kevin Owens looking to prove to Sami that the Bloodline don’t have his best interests at heart, or simply another member of the “Brawling Brutes” team looking to spy on their rivals’ plotting and planning. Above all, though, the biggest no-no should be that wrestlers should never be shown to be ignorant of events that took place on the television show itself. Again, the entire intrigue around Sami Zayn and Kevin Owens’ conversation could have been resolved had any member of The Bloodline watched the show they wrestle on. This was apparently beyond the capabilities of their master strategist, Paul Heyman.

The match itself suffered for much of what I’ve already talked about. The modern WWE style is almost entirely unconducive to a good War Games match, in the style of the original Jim Crockett Promotions and WCW versions of the match. While not as awful as the bright-red cage of the modern Hell In A Cell match, WWE’s War Games cage is too polished, too designed for HD TV and the facilitation of high spots from well-placed platforms atop the cage, to lend the sense of danger and drama of a traditional cage match; it doesn’t feel gritty, dirty and dangerous, it feels purpose-built and sanitised. At worst, it feels designed to sell a playset for WWE action figures. The lack of roof, the brightness of WWE lighting and the glossiness of their production, combined with the sheer size of a WWE ring, means the match never feels as claustrophobic and locked in as the gimmick should, even when all ten men are in the ring. One of the weaknesses of WWE booking is the - to my eyes - insane long-standing decision that heel wrestlers are not permitted to cheat as a matter of course, only (and even then rarely) when cheating is directly related to the finish of the match. Without cheating, there are no true heels, and no true heat. Heel heat comes from transgression - the sense that somebody is breaking the rules and, more significantly, getting away with it. Whether in wrestling, any other sport, in politics, or in life, nobody hates anyone more than when they believe they’re getting away with something that we believe they should be punished for, and believe that we would have been punished for had we done the same thing. The sine qua non of wrestling storytelling is that babyfaces are deserving winners and heels undeserving winners - if heels don’t cheat, they’re no less deserving than anyone else, and the whole edifice falls down.

Furthermore, not only does the match lack real heat as a result of WWE’s own baffling house rules, the WWE’s lack of blood, and reliance on signature moves and sequences and coordinated spots, means that there’s never really a sense that a match is getting more intense or more violent, so there isn’t the escalation that should come in a War Games match as more participants enter. In WWE, the substitute for an increase in violence, risk or intensity is to introduce weapons into the match, but when the weapons are the same steel chairs, trashcan lids and kendo sticks that we see every week, there’s no sense of genuine escalation. That contrived lack of heat is made even worse by the War Games stipulation - with the match unable to end until everyone has entered, we’re robbed even of the tension that comes from two counts and near falls, from the prospect of the match ending at any time. That’s been a feature of War Games since the beginning, but traditionally the purpose of the match prior to what used to be called “the match beyond” has been for the heels to systematically pick apart their babyface opponents, but there was no sense of that here, and it would have been nigh-on impossible to replicate that sense of violence and heat generation within a house style that is seemingly purpose-built to avoid either of those essential elements of a War Games match. That’s particularly egregious when, as per a match on Smackdown the night before, the babyface team had the numbers advantage, which only served to further reduce the heat that the Bloodline could generate, even if they had been able to.

Back to the topic of cheating in WWE, at multiple points during both War Games matches, Michael Cole’s efforts to explain the stipulation involved pointing out that “there’s no point going for a pinfall or submission before everyone has entered”, as the match couldn’t end. While technically true that the match couldn’t end that way, it’s certainly not true that there’s no point for a wrestler to attempt a submission - simply put, would it not be advantageous for one wrestler to use submission holds to break down the members of the opposing team before all of their teammates were in the match? Would that, in fact, not be the entire point of the first portion of the match? Instead, wrestlers were booked more like Royal Rumble entrants, getting an individual shine every time they entered the match, but with little overall impact on the flow or the story of the match as a whole, there was no sense of a team working towards a broader strategy, or working towards winning the match through their actions before the “match beyond” began. It felt akin to WWE’s booking of No DQ matches and approach to cheating in general - there are few things more irritating to me in WWE than a wrestler breaking the rules in a No DQ situation, while Michael Cole gleefully exclaims “it’s all legal!”; “No DQ” shouldn’t amount to carte blanche for babyfaces to break the rules with impunity, but for the face to get proportionate payback on a heel, no more and no less. Again, here the rules of wrestling are used for wrestling’s sake, and divorced from the generation of heat.

Jonathan Snowden recently wrote for The Ringer about the legacies of Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels, most notably (to me, at least) making a distinction between their two approaches - Michaels’ legacy is of wrestling matches that privilege “moments” above all else, while Bret’s matches focused on fine detail work and credibility throughout, prioritising the whole package over the one or two “highlight reel” spots. The perfect marriage of the two could be argued as the Bret Hart/Steve Austin Submission Match, where Bret’s detail work makes the whole match a believable and compelling brawl, while the visual of Austin defiantly bleeding in the Sharpshooter provides the highlight reel moment. A War Games match, particularly in the opening stretch, is a match that calls for fine detail work - this was a match designed for the likes of Arn Anderson to systematically pick apart babyfaces for minutes at a time, not for WWE-style high spots and melodrama, but here, in the WWE of 2022, the match has been repurposed for “moments” and melodrama, and with limited results.

Thankfully, as far as WWE melodrama goes, it was the good stuff, thanks to the sheer commitment to the bit of Sami Zayn. From beginning to end, his conflicted emotions were believable, and never fell victim to the “say the story out loud and unambiguously” approach to storytelling that has befallen so much of WWE in recent years, and particularly the matches of Roman Reigns. This was a rare instance of WWE trusting their wrestlers to tell the story at hand through wrestling, and wrestling alone, and it’s unsurprising that it worked very, very well. The only downside is that WWE can’t help but indulge in a little revisionist history in the service of a story, and while it can be forgiven when they choose to overlook events outside of their own control, it’s particularly egregious when they handwave away events that they booked. The story at hand here relied on the suggestion that Sami Zayn and Kevin Owens have been friends for 20+ years, and that for anything to step between that friendship would be unforgivable and unprecedented. You probably don’t need me to tell you that Kevin Owens turned heel on Sami Zayn in his very first night in WWE, and went on to feud with him throughout 2016 and 2017, events that could have been woven into this narrative - an easy to imagine alternative version of this story would have seen Kevin Owens acknowledge that part of their shared history, accept that he knew what it was to use an ally to further his own career, but that now he had grown and moved on and could recognise the Bloodline using Sami, while conversely the Bloodline could remind Sami that Kevin Owens is not to be trusted. Instead, WWE’s version of the story relied on their audience forgetting their own history. It’s a testament to both men’s abilities, and their performances within this match, that they succeeded in spite of this. Given the failings of WWE’s approach to War Games, and the story they intended to tell here, I can’t help but think that they would have been better served by a traditional Survivor Series elimination match here, with the Bloodline reluctant to allow Sami to tag in, until members start getting eliminated and they need to rely on him to prove his allegiance. If WWE had not been lured by the dual sirens of “remember this?” and “first time ever”, this could have been a better match than it was.

That Sami Zayn was able to display both his joy at being truly accepted by The Bloodline and helped them win the match and his dawning realisation of what he had to do for that to happen, shows what a superb performer he is, and why so many have rallied behind him in the last year. The presumed end destination for this story is Sami Zayn & Kevin Owens vs. The Usos at Wrestlemania, though - as mentioned earlier - many have called for Zayn to get a shot at Roman Reigns himself, and maybe even be the one to beat the Tribal Chief. With Zayn directly responsible for the Bloodline’s win, it’ll be an interesting journey to see how we get to that destination - sometimes knowing the intended plan and not knowing exactly what route the story will take to get there is just as compelling as not knowing the end result at all.

So what does come next, as we head towards the first Wrestlemania season of the Triple H era? It’s an interesting question - looking ahead to the Royal Rumble, are we likely to see a more interesting range of mystery entrants now we are no longer beholden to Vince McMahon’s assumptions about who the audience will remember or recognise? What does a Wrestlemania card look like without Vince McMahon’s involvement? That could be the first big test of the current regime.

Specifically in relation to Sami Zayn’s story, what does the road to Wrestlemania from hereon out look like? Let me indulge in some fantasy booking here. One assumes that Kevin Owens is going to be out for an explanation, and out for revenge, so let’s assume they get booked in a match together at the Royal Rumble. There, it almost doesn’t matter who wins, so long as Kevin gets through to Sami and earns his respect - enough to make Sami question his decisions; perhaps the Usos or Solo Sikoa get involved and accidentally cost Sami the match or, better yet, perhaps he insists that he can go it alone and they try and help him regardless, in a reversal of Sami’s stooge role before earning the Bloodline’s respect. Whatever happens, it leads Sami to the realisation that the Bloodline aren’t there for him at all, that their only purpose is protecting the title reign of Roman Reigns. As Sami begins to question his decisions, he and Solo Sikoa both earn a spot in an Elimination Chamber match at the PPV of the same name, along with Kevin Owens, for Roman Reigns’ belt. There, in Sami’s hometown of Montreal, Roman Reigns expects him to play defence and protect the title for Reigns - as the reality of the situation dawns on Zayn, he takes the initiative to eliminate Solo Sikoa and go it alone, even standing up to and fighting against Roman Reigns. As Reigns goes to hit Kevin Owens with the Spear, Sami Zayn shoves Owens out of the way, taking a proverbial bullet for his friend, and costing himself the match. Reigns will ultimately emerge victorious and go into Wrestlemania with the title, but Sami has come to his senses, won back his friendship with Kevin Owens, and walked out as the most beloved babyface in Montreal, ready to take on his former allies The Usos for the Tag Team Titles. Depending on Reigns’ Wrestlemania matches and post-Mania run, there’s always the possibility of a Sami/Reigns match at Backlash, or later down the line.

And that’s it. A pay-per-view (sorry, Premium Live Event) that struggled to get out of its own way, and was a victim of problems of WWE’s own making, and a sign of the company’s continued ability to intermittently succeed in spite of itself. I’m still far from a convert to the Triple H approach to booking, but I am intrigued about the direction of at least one story as laid out on this show.