Monday Night Yawn

Welcome… to Monday Night Yawn…

Starting on Monday June 9th, Vince McMahon began giving away one million dollars during the live telecast of Monday Night Raw. To enter, you need to register at wwe.com with your name, address, sex, age, and phone number, and watch the program live to get the “password” while you’re waiting for the call. Apparently a move to bolster ratings (not sure why he didn’t do it during sweeps), while also boosting the number of registered users on their web site. I could also see where having the registration information would be useful when talking to advertisers, so that they could give more information about their demographics instead of relying in the Nielsen data.

In his speech the previous week, McMahon also mentioned that it was an attempt to bring back some fans that hadn’t watched Raw for awhile, and recruit some new viewers that have never watched the program.

Rather than putting on some solid matches and compelling content to give these new fans and “lapsed” fans a reason to tune in every week, we were all treated to an absolute snoozefest.

Seeing McMahon fumble with the touch tone phone was like watching someone’s grandpa “drunk dial”. He took several attempts to dial the numbers, all with the crowd getting more and more restless. Giving away random amounts of money was okay (the total for the night was $1 million), but I can’t understand why he would give one woman two dollars! What is the best thing you could think would happen after that? Is that excited family that probably freaked out when their phone started ringing going to be watching next week? Do you think that someone might tune in and find that so hilarious that they would watch the program again?

With the constant interruptions of the program to watch the Chairman of the Board fatfinger a telephone, and some of the stupid antics (like Charlie Haas and Mae Young) that rivaled the writing at an award show, the whole production seemed amateur.

Apart from that, we got to see some “interesting” facts going into the commercial breaks, like “Did you know that Monday Night Raw is the highest rated regularly scheduled program on cable?“. Anyone who was watching for the first time would surely be asking, “Why?”

I would hope Vince McMahon is going to “re-tool” the program next week, if he continues the giveaway at all.