Okay, I’m back from Chicago and my week off, and ready to rock you into the transition into 2.0. Let’s just hope that we come up with something for a slogan before that. The arguments in the super-secret writers’ forum have been hot and heavy in regard to that particular subject. I’ve decided not to join in because, well, I’m not a sloganeering type. But you’ll be able to witness the changes very, very soon here, and having seen most of them, I, for one, can tell you that you’ll be pleased.
This is unusual for a Short Form, I have to admit. It’s more like a Wednesday thing. However, it does actually touch the subject matter at hand here and it’s something we’ve been following. From Reuters:
Viacom Inc.’s Sumner Redstone said Thursday he planned to step down as chief executive from the global media conglomerate by next year when it is expected to split in two, but remain as chairman.
Viacom’s co-presidents Les Moonves and Tom Freston are expected to take the top executive roles at CBS and Viacom, respectively.
The company posted a quarterly profit, driven by advertising gains at advertising sales growth at MTV and BET.
The owner of Paramount movie studios and the CBS television network plans to split its fast moving cable networks and movies division from its mature, cash-generating broadcast and radio networks by the first quarter of next year.
Viacom’s quarterly divisional performance was yet another display of why management has attempted to address investor frustration over the units’ differing financial characteristics.
“Cable carried the ball for everything during the quarter–That’s the way they’ve been for a long time now,” said Harold Vogel, media analyst of Vogel Capital Management .
The second quarter was yet another period when cable networks advertising growth drove much of the gains, with revenue jumping 14 percent to $2 billion and operating income rising at the same rate to $711 million. Cable advertising rose 19 percent.
Television revenue fell 1 percent to $2 billion, with a 4 percent growth in ad sales offset by lower TV license revenue. TV ad sales rose 7 percent at CBS and the UPN Networks. But its stations group ad sales fell 4 percent from the weak local ad market.
Its long-suffering radio division posted a surprising 1 percent rise in revenue to $567 million, reflecting a stronger local advertising market offset by weak national sales.
Despite posting a 24 percent jump in films, books and music publishing revenue, Viacom booked a quarterly operating income loss of $12.6 million. Film profits were dragged by severance charges and the timing of film expenses.
When the Viacom split was announced, Redstone’s imminent retirement was expected by everyone. He’s in his 80s, after all, and Viacom split off his baby, Blockbuster, last year as a separate unit. There was really nothing left for Redstone at the company per se.
Also, and most important, this could have only been done after the separation announcement. The company would have torn itself apart in a succession struggle if not for that. A couple of years ago, it was simple: Mel Karmazin was heir apparent, period. But then he ran into a pure gut fighter in Les Moonves. Mel’s pretty tough, but everyone agrees that he’s a nice guy at heart. Moonves isn’t. He plays rough, and his virtual ousting of Karmazin proves it. So now Karmazin’s over at Sirius waiting for his old pal Howard Stern to get there next year, while Moonves receives his coronation courtesy of Redstone standing down.
And it would have been a fight. Tom Freston’s spent a long time at what’s now MTV Networks and soon to become Viacom. He’s built up a lot of goodwill for turning MTV Networks into the powerhouse that it is. He’s got his own clutch of powerful acolytes there. He would have put up a fight and not given into Moonves’ power trip. And this would have torn Viacom apart. There’s no doubt about that. It would have made the fight between Andre the Giant and Roy Disney look like a quiet 18 at one of Disney’s resort courses. The separation gives each of them their own specialized bailiwicks.
It also showed who held the whip hand at Viacom. Moonves got the good shit, Freston was stuck with his beloved cable properties and the crap end. The levers of power in the multinational multimedia venue were put into Moonves’ hands. Freston was bribed with a rather illusory kingdom in order to shut him up while Moonves became Master Of All He Surveys. And everyone knows that it’s His Way Or The Highway. He’s willing to make the ballsy decisions. In order to actualize his view of what CBS should be, he’s already performed two moves that would have been considered daring by anyone else in Hollywood:
1) He put the Star Trek franchise into a deep coma at best or into the grave at worst. Considering the billions that Trek has earned Paramount and Viacom over the decades, anyone would be reluctant to put the franchise into mothballs, especially with a highly-exploitable 40th Anniversary coming up next year. But he (correctly) judged that it wasn’t pulling its weight anymore thanks to Berman and Braga neutering it.
2) He broke off talks with WWE and sent them packing. Raw, despite everything, is still one of the highest-rated shows on free cable. Smackdown was providing them two hours a week of relatively cheap programming for UPN (although not as cheap as a reality show to make, it’s still cheaper than your average one-hour drama). The terms they were running on in this contract weren’t bad for either side. But Vince wanted more and Viacom wanted less, and neither was going to budge. So Moonves pulled the trigger on letting the contract run out and let Raw go back to USA. The only reason that Smackdown is going to be on the air this season, even on Fridays, was that Viacom didn’t have two hours of replacement programming for UPN available. They’d already experienced a loser with movies on Friday to eat up that slot, so they didn’t want to return to that. So it’s Smackdown on Fridays until May Sweeps, then bye-bye. As for the Spike/TNA deal, that lasts until Spike ditches the Saturday night action package, and then TNA gets to go hunting again. Unless history decides to repeat itself and the presence of wrestling in a shit time slot on Spike does the same thing to them that it did to ECW in 2000.
So, for all intents and purposes, Les Moonves has become The Dog With The Big Nuts now. There’s going to be no one above him to protest to (Redstone’s going to be a do-nothing chairman). It’s over, and he wins. Worse for all of us, he’ll probably succeed to the stockholders’ satisfaction, and then no one will be able to get rid of him.
Wonder if someone can arrange a convenient “accident” for him like with Frank Wells?
Just want to mention something else regarding wrestling here. WWE is examining the library of WCCW to finalize a purchase from Kevin Von Erich. I’m really jazzed about this, actually. What WWE is really looking for in that library is the last of the WCCW footage, which contains early appearances by Foley and Wife-Beater. What I’m looking for is the stuff from the early 80s. This is the wrestling that got me interested after being completely bored with AWA back in Chicago. When I moved to Dallas in ’82 to go to college, WCCW presented wrestling as I’d never seen it before, and wrestling that interested me. They were the pioneers of anglo-lucha, and their guys knew how to move in the ring. The late Chris Adams, the late Gino Hernandez, Brian Adias…I was fortunate in having been able to see David Von Erich at his peak. They’re all just names now, and I want to see them shown on 24/7 so that other people can understand what enthused me back then. Of course, it’s going to be ripped from context, and what seemed “wow” to me over two decades ago won’t raise anyone’s neck hairs today, but it’s worth seeing. I’m still a Freebirds mark due to their WCCW stuff (something that Keith will never forgive me for). Please, WWE, finalize this purchase, and give the early 80s stuff some play instead of just concentrating on the final days of WCCW.
One more thing before we get to the shits and giggles:
Memo To Scooter: It’s a wonderful tradition that we have of you posting your old recaps prior to a major PPV. It goes all the way back to our days together at Rantsylvania, when you were an RSPW God and I was a member of the Rant Crew breaking into what would eventually be called the IWC. It’s a tradition that should continue. However, don’t you think that it would be a good idea every, oh, couple of years to go into these things and edit them? That way you could get rid of the au courant references you put into your last editings of them which aren’t so courant anymore. Plus, you could add new material and such to give context. It also gets rid of things that are, well, downright creepy, like the 1989 and 1990 SummerSlam recaps referring to Liz and Rick Rude in a…uh…present tense; those are a lot more morbid than the present-tense WCW references, frankly.
Just a suggestion. It’s one of the big reasons that I don’t reprint old columns. I don’t feel like going into them and updating them.
Well, on to the shows…
THE SMACKDOWN SHORT FORM
Match Results:
Joey Mercury and Johnny Nitro over Our Lord and Savior and Chocolate Christ (Pinfall, Mercury pins Booker, rollup): We’ve spent the last week here bemoaning the fact that the tag divisions on both shows are officially dead. If anything, this match proves it. Benoit and Booker spent the entire match carrying Matthews and Nitro like two-hundred-pound backpacks. The disguise was so shallow it required the services of not one, but three women to attempt to support. And the ending was hinky enough to support more in this demi-feud. I don’t mind them using Benoit and Booker as a tag team while they’re thinking up something for the guys to do while High-Quality Speaker Boy f*cks around with Batista (and while Eddy/Rey-Rey still continues festering), but it’s pretty painful to see when it’s obvious there really isn’t a tag team left on SD other than MNM. I beseech all powers greater than myself (what few there are) to assist Benoit and Booker in this time of need.
Benoit is a master of the “Ha, Ha, You Sucker” school of wrestling
The Legion Of Dumb over John Daniels and Damien Something-Or-Other (Pinfall, Heidenreich pins One Of Them, Doomsday Device): Look, this has now crossed the line into Too Sad territory. End this, please, for all our sakes.
Memo to the late Mike Hegstrand: the liquid you feel is someone pissing on your grave
Rey-Rey over Christian (Pinfall, springboard leg drop): We expected it to be a good match, and it was a good match. It was a good match that featured the worst transition into the 619 ever shown, of course, but it was still a good match. However, it was a good angle advancement match, and that makes it a bad match. Christian was ill-served in this one. He’s put in the work to have a main event match that 1) he can actually win and 2) that isn’t any kind of angle advancement bullshit for his opponent. Frankly, he’s got the chops to be Number One Heel on Smackdown, but we all know that won’t be his fate because Vince WUVS Big Men, and there’s High-Quality Speaker Boy there, not to mention Randy Orton. Makes me feel bad for him, really. So he’s now fated to play the Chris Jericho role: always a bridesmaid, but he’s got a talk show.
As for the angle in service, now the rumor is Eddy/Rey-Rey, Ladder Match for Dominic’s custody. Man, this is getting sicker and sicker by the moment. I’m sorry, but I can’t take this anymore. As most readers know, I was adopted shortly after birth, and I take topics like this very seriously. I’m suffered a lot over the thirty-five years that I’ve known I was adopted, and I’m come close to getting some information a few times (and wussed out). Seeing this situation played like this…I just can’t be comfortable with it. So, allow me to ignore it as much as possible.
So I like posting pictures of Rey-Rey putting his face in another guy’s crotch. Sue me.
And Eddy’s lawyer will help defend me against you.
Angle Developments:
Screw The Silly Text, Let’s Just Have A Couple Of Pictures And Captions:
Where will you be when your diarrhea medication runs out?
After this experiment, the Borg abandoned the idea of flesh-colored implants
Brilliant Disguise: So now the Batista/High-Quality Speaker Boy match is going to be No Holds Barred? Oh, man, do they really want to stay away from a real wrestling match between these two or not? We already have major train wrecks on the card with Michaels/Hogan and Jericho/Cena (sorry, but I have no confidence in Michaels to carry Hogan at both their ages and Jericho to carry Cena at any age), so I guess this is a good move. In fact, carry the sucker backstage and have Trip make a surprise appearance to knock the shit out of High-Quality Speaker Boy. As the man said in that video excerpt, it’s all about Evolution. It’ll also set up a nice interpromotional SurSer match between Trip and High-Quality Speaker Boy…look, it’s perfect. It keeps BOTH of them away from title matches. You come up with a better solution, fanboy.
High-Quality Speaker Boy shows off his new Conan O’Brien mask
THE IMPACT SHORT FORM
No screencaps due to the shitty quality of the streamcatch that I downloaded, of course.
Match Results:
Samoa Joe over Alex Shelley, Super X-Cup Semi-Final Match (Submission, Kokina Clutch): The cynical among us might say that the overriding emphasis here was on whose blowjob push was the strongest. Since I am the cynical among us, I will say that. Joe’s receiving an unbelievable push that has turned this tournament into a farce. Everyone knows he’s going to win it, spoilers or not. Since Styles a
nd Williams can survive this kind of mini-burial, the trick here was to get Joe the win without Shelley losing any momentum from his massive push. They succeeded in this one. Well-booked match here, displayed as being an even fight, with plenty of opportunity for Shelley to show off his moveset. The guy’s become one helluva mat-based wrestler. Good work by all involved.
Andy Douglas and Chase Stevens over Bobby Roode and Eric Young, Tag Title Match (DQ, Fun With Megaphones): I like seeing extended low-level slow-burn feuds. When done well, they’re quite satisfying without being in-your-face. I enjoy seeing this one because I believe that the Naturals and Team Canada (specifically the combination of Roode and Young) work well together in the ring. That was demonstrated quite well in this match. I can’t criticize the match flow or level of action. Even the interference worked. However, it’s become quite clear that TNA doesn’t know what they’re doing in regard to these guys. The nice aspects of this feud have become overwhelmed by the fact that TNA has no clue what to do with the Naturals at this moment. If they drop the belts to Team Canada, it’s obviously as a transition to get them back on AMW. But Team Canada is the only team at this moment with the heel creds to go up against the Naturals and make it look good. This is a waiting game, pure and simple. The asinine end to this match, with all of the Eddy Guerrero Rip-Off Goodness that you can stand, points out this fact clearly. Either put this feud on the front burner, build it up, and blow it off, or just take the focus off of tag teams completely. We all know what WWE has done to the tag divisions; now that attitude seems to be slipping into TNA. And that’s a damn shame.
Abyss over Apolo (Pinfall, Black Hole Slam): Look, if this match sucked with Sonny Siaki as Abyss’ opponent, why do you think his partner could do any better? This was one where I was just waiting for it to end. And setting up Abyss with a Lance Hoyt feud? Good, keep the two of them together so I don’t have to ignore them separately.
Raven and Sabu over Simon Diamond and David Young (Pinfall, Sabu pins Young, chair-assisted leg drop): I liked this match a great deal more when it was in ECW and Young was called “Mikey Whipwreck”. Jesus, TNA, make up your f*cking mind. Do you want to be WCW or ECW? It’s one or the other, you know.
Angle Developments:
None this week. Chock-full of matches with virtually no backstage stuff. Of course, they’ve got some more time to pimp for the PPV, so this is no surprise.
And that’s all for me from this end. Join me next week when 2.0 should be in full swing, and I won’t be paying attention to anything because it’s PGA Week. Ta.
