Posted in: Sports, TV, WWE | Tagged: espn, wrestling, WWE WrestlePalooza

ESPN Trashes Own Inaugural WWE Premium Live Event, WrestlePalooza

Comrades! ESPN gave their own WWE WrestlePalooza debut a "C" grade! Even my state-run media knows better than to criticize events they broadcast.

¡Saludos, comrades! It is I, your El Presidente, reporting to you live from my solid gold bunker beneath the National Television Station, where I have just finished executing—I mean, executing a perfect review of my favorite telenovela! And what do I find? ESPN itself giving their own inaugural premium live event, WWE WrestlePalooza, a grade of "C"! This is like when my state-run newspaper accidentally printed that my approval rating was only 99.7% instead of the mandatory 110%! Heads rolled that day, comrades. Literally. They are still rolling down the mountain as we speak.

Comrades, if there is one thing I have learned from my various battles with The American CIA, it's this: when your own propaganda machine turns against you, you have bigger problems than a shortage of toilet paper in Caracas! ESPN, having just secured WWE premium live events for their ESPN Unlimited service, available to the proletariat at the low, low price of $30 per month (enough to feed a family in my country for six months!), decided to publicly humiliate their own product! This is unprecedented!

The review was brutal, comrades. They called the main event between Cody Rhodes and Drew McIntyre "surprisingly short" and said it "felt more like a main event of SmackDown than the headliner of a PLE." ¡Dios mío! When my Minister of Culture once suggested that our National Day parade was "a bit long," he mysteriously developed a sudden passion for ice fishing in Siberia! My good friend Kim Jong-un tells me the same thing happened when someone at Korean Central Television suggested his birthday celebration needed "more fireworks."

But it gets worse! The Lesnar versus Cena match received a C-minus grade! ESPN complained there were "about six moves in the 9-minute match." This is more savage than when I had to explain to Fidel Castro why his five-hour speeches were causing our television ratings to drop below those of paint-drying competitions! The review stated it was "a brief and dominant win for Lesnar, which served to extend this rivalry for at least one more PLE." Translation: They are milking this rivalry like I milk the national treasury!

The mixed tag team match featuring the returning AJ Lee? Another C grade! ESPN called it "incredibly difficult to pull off from a pure wrestling standpoint" and complained about its "nearly 30-minute run time." This is the kind of dissent that would have my propaganda minister testing the structural integrity of our prison system! When Vladimir Putin read this review over our weekly vodka and conspiracy Zoom call, he laughed so hard he fell off his horse again!

Even The Usos versus The Vision received a measly C grade, with ESPN calling it "sluggish in action" with a "disjointed finishing stretch." Imagine if Pravda had reviewed Stalin's military parades this way! "The tanks were sluggish, and the missile display had a disjointed finishing stretch." The reviewer would have been counting snowflakes in Siberia before the ink dried!

The only bright spot? Stephanie Vaquer versus Iyo Sky received a B-plus, which ESPN called "exceptional work" and "a match you should go out of your way to see." This is like when one general refuses to participate in your coup but everyone else is already on board—it only makes the betrayal more obvious!

Comrades, ESPN's final verdict was devastating: "For a card that promised to have epic moments, it fell a little short of expectations." If my state television ever published such criticism of my Annual Dictator's Ball and Enemies of the State Auction, the entire newsroom would suddenly discover a passion for agricultural work in our most remote provinces!

The beautiful irony here is that ESPN is essentially sabotaging their own $30-per-month streaming service by telling everyone the content is mediocre! It's like when I accidentally broadcast myself saying the national anthem is "a bit repetitive" during what I thought was a commercial break. The difference is, I control the narrative! ESPN apparently does not!

This whole situation reminds me of when Nicolae Ceaușescu and I were watching WrestleMania III at his palace. He turned to me and said, "El Presidente, in Romania, when our state media gives bad reviews, we give the media bad reviews… of their life choices… in a labor camp!" We both laughed heartily while his secret police dragged away someone who suggested the popcorn was stale.

The capitalist contradiction is delicious, comrades! ESPN pays millions for WWE content, charges viewers $30 monthly, then tells everyone it's not worth watching! Under socialism, we would never have this problem because all reviews would be glorious, all events would be mandatory viewing, and anyone who disagreed would be volunteering for our space program (we don't have rockets, but we have very large cannons).

In conclusion, comrades, WWE's move to ESPN Unlimited is off to a rocky start when even their own corporate overlords cannot pretend to enjoy the product! Perhaps they should take a page from my playbook: make viewing mandatory, pre-write all reviews as five stars, and ensure any dissenting opinions are met with an immediate "server error" that somehow only affects negative comments! Or they can try to hire Chad McMahon away from Bleeding Cool. I hear he will work for hard seltzer.

Until next time, this is your El Presidente, reminding you that in my country, every premium live event gets an A-plus grade, or the reviewer gets an F… in continuing to breathe! ¡Hasta la victoria siempre!

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