Dr. Darin Davis

What do you do when your guest host gets booed by 80% of the audience?

The WWE is continuing to try to insert themselves in the talk show circuit (see WWE + Talk Show = Raw), by booking celebrities as guest hosts on their  live Monday Night Raw program. If you’re a celebrity with something to plug, you’re in. The guest host usually does some kind of schtick, and the WWE bends over backwards and kisses their ass. WWE “Creative” writes the whole show around them and sets up some matches that the guest host pretends to book on the fly. Since the host is expected to be well liked, the WWE gets more viewers and the celeb gets to plug their wares to a different type of audience.

Except this week.

This week’s guest host was the Reverend Al Sharpton. Reverend Al was there as part of his tour to promote literacy among minorities. Noble cause, sounds good so far.

But Raw was broadcast live this week from Albany, NY, and apparently Albany doesn’t really like Sharpton. Not even a little bit. And did I mention it was live? No chance to “sweeten” the audio to tone down the chorus of boos. Just have to run with it I guess.

Jeremy Piven was the only other guest host I can think of that was booed, but only after he turned “heel” during the program. That was planned, and the crowd reacted as planned.

For a typical talk show, the audience gets in for free, provided that they win the ticket lottery or get in line for standby tickets. They are mainly there to see the host.

The WWE fans paid money to see wrestling. Considering that in the first hour and 14 minutes of the program there were only two wrestling matches, they had a lot to be angry about besides Sharpton.

Seems like having a different guest host on WWE Monday Night Raw each week is not about ratings, and not just as a cover for not choosing an official general manager. Sounds like more than a coincidence that everyone just happens to be on in time to plug their latest project.

Maybe I’m just stating the obvious here, but the way wrestling sites write about “guest host” and “ratings” together, it seems like they’re assuming that it is just a ratings game.

While Shaq and Seth Green may have caused a ratings bump, ZZ Top surely must have caused a ratings drop for their segments. Not because people don’t like their music, but because of how terrible the pre-taped (supposedly “live”) segments were during the show. Their music would play (minus the vocals), and they seemed to have trouble deciding whether or not they should pretend to play guitar at the same time, or just acknowledge that it wasn’t live music. Thanks for showing up guys- oh… you’ve got a new album out this week? Really? What a coincidence. Oh, and Seth your new season of Robot Chicken is starting? Guest host Jeremy Piven (and the little Asian dude with him) has a new movie coming out? Wow, thanks to everyone for taking time out of your promotional tour to stop by our little wrestling show.

I like Piven’s performance in the HBO TV show Entourage, and I will say that having a host “turn heel” was a novel approach, but an auctioneer couldn’t have mentioned their movie more times in two hours than these two guys did.

I’m curious what kind of $$$’s were exchanged for what is somewhere between an infomercial and product placement (too bad Billy Mays wasn’t still available). Probably worth it to the WWE financially (in the short term) even if the ratings suffered . A little publicity from the mainstream press maybe (yes, Monday Night Raw is still on Monday nights folks). But how many weeks can you do this before pissing off your audience?

Any predictions for who will be the next few guest hosts? If I took the time to scan the release calendars for upcoming films and CDs I could probably hazard a guess. They already announced Sgt. Slaughter will be coming out of the back office to host next week. I smell G.I. Joe‘s kung fu grip, though I wonder why they wouldn’t have done that on opening week (the new G.I. Joe movie opens on Aug 7th).