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"WWE Monday Night RAW": PPVs, Decent Promos Make Better Effort [Review]

After a mostly disappointing WWE Monday Night RAW last week, this week's episode took a little from last week's RAW and SmackDown and found ways to improve – a little.

RAW opened with Paul Heyman and Brock Lesnar in an empty ring, within an even emptier performance center. Heyman gave a passionate promo to hype up viewers at home for the upcoming Drew McIntyre/Brock Lesnar for the WWE Championship. Heyman is a master at delivering promos, regardless of who's watching. It's honestly a delight watching him. I won't mince my words, it is unfair that the McIntyre/Lesnar match won't be before a live crowd. But I still applaud WWE for attempting to bring entertainment every week in this ever changing world.

This week's episode did rely on past WWE matches, including the 2015 Royal Rumble match between Seth Rollins, John Cena, and Lesnar. The next match was the WrestleMania 34 match between Asuka and Charlotte Flair — which is still a tough one to watch, as that match ended Asuka's roll.

We did have three live matches though! The first was between Andrade, and Angel Garza, against Cedric Alexander and Ricochet. This was a delightful match. All four men are very evenly matched, making this exciting and just plain fun to watch. Andrade and Garza won the match, before The Street Profits came out to confront Andrade and Garza. This then led into a match between the Profits,  Shane Thorne and Brendan Vink. This was a quick squash match with the Profits being victorious. Aleister Black and Leon Ruff had the last match in the program, which was another "enhancement talent" squash match.

We got some decent promos too. AJ Styles and The OG talked a lot of smack about the Undertaker. It was a good promo and did the job to move the story along to WrestleMania. Kevin Owens and Seth Rollins also cut an in ring promo on each other. I personally feel that Owens wins any promo he cuts, and he was fantastic tonight. We did see Shayna Baszler give an intimidating interview in the ring, only to be interrupted by Becky Lynch — again, to move that story along. Charlotte Flair cut an adequate promo backstage, and Randy Orton got the last promo of the night. I like Orton, but I like him better when he's giving RKO's out of nowhere.

RAW is still getting into its own groove, but this was a much better effort than last week. Also, I can not give a big enough shout out to production for moving hard cam.

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