By now, everybody will have formed their own opinions on RAW’s weekly guest host situation, whether they be good or bad. The decision to have guest hosts alone was controversial enough, but I decided to give it a few weeks before I made any judgment. Now, a few weeks has passed and I can assure you my judgment isn’t favourable towards the WWE.
The problem with having guest hosts isn’t that they are lacking a consistent authority figure, or because the guest hosts aren’t entertaining, because that varies from week to week and is a bit hit and miss depending on the segment. Take the Shaq/ Big Show opening segment last week as an example of not entertaining, then look at the Shaq/ Cryme Time/ Santino Marella segment as an example of a guest host segment being entertaining. Of course that could all be down to Santino Marella, one of RAW’s highlights each week, but I digress.
There are two big problems with RAW’s guest host situation. The first is the time wasting, and by this I mean advertising. Every guest host gets plenty of publicity during the live RAW broadcast, much of it coming from unneeded segments used just to get their faces on the screen as much as possible. This is made worse by the stupid amount of time they spend advertising the latest guest host’s endeavours in their respective field.
Now this might not seem like a problem, until you take into account how the time wasted on this advertising could be better used furthering storylines. Ted DiBiase’s time as guest host proved much more beneficial to storyline advancement that any other guest host. Hell, even Shaq’s involvement gave room to book Summerslam’s Unified Tag Team Championship match. If the guest host spot is going to be taken seriously, then WWE needs to focus on using it to advance long term storylines, not work things week by week.
The other major problem is how every guest host seems to be able to wrestle a match with actual superstars, and I use the term wrestle loosely. Seth Green fought in a RAW main event. Shaq pushed Big Show around, and Jeremy Piven executed a cross body. These actions don’t make the guest host look good, because they’re only around for one week, but they do make the professional superstars look bad. If any old celebrity can come in and look like they can hold their own against the WWE superstars, then surely anybody else could, and then what makes the superstars special anymore?
The biggest problem with having guest hosts is having to deal with outside talent. Big stars have egos and are not going to put the wrestlers or the company before themselves. If RAW wants to be a success then the writers need to focus on the storylines, not some publicity gimmick.
