Tuesday 18 February 2014

The Titus O'Neil Show

Forget having Batista win the Royal Rumble. Forget allowing CM Punk to walk away. Forget continuing with the epic push of Randy Orton. The biggest mistake WWE have made so far this year has been splitting The Prime Time Players.

Titus O’Neil and Darren Young were never going to be the slickest or greatest tag team working in wrestling. But they easily had the potential to be the one of the most entertaining. More than that, they hold no appeal as singles acts. Working alone they’ll just get lost amongst WWE’s packed roster of no-hopers.

The dream is over...
The PTPs had things left to achieve together. Despite teaming up while the doubles scene was at a low point and working together for nearly two years they never won the tag team championship (although they did become the number one contenders several times). That’s an obvious goal they could have worked towards. They could have tried to get themselves a meaningful non-title tag match on a pay-per-view. A match against the New Age Outlaws would have been a nice thing for them to try and obtain too. They would have been a great choice to be part of the division’s foundation because they’re decent wrestlers, have solid characters, and can function as either fan favourites or dastardly bad guys.

They also had a lot of potential outside of the ring. Specifically they could have done well with their own WWE flavoured chat show. When I say chat show I mean the sort of show you get in the US, rather than British shows hosted by the likes of Jonathan Ross (his shows are more about shilling movies, TV shows and other assorted nonsense) or Jeremy Kyle (a man too aggressive and angry to have started his career in the US). I mean more the likes of Montel Williams or Maury Povich.

Picture the scene. A talk show set is constructed on the entranceway (the ring long ago became passé for this sort of thing), consisting of a couch, an armchair, a fake wall with a logo on it, and a lamp (because shows like this always have needless furniture). Titus strolls out wearing a polo neck or a suit with tinted glasses and talks about two men who have been having a disagreement (to wrestlers feuding, though it’d all be framed in chat show terms as opposed to wrestling terms). He introduces the first and gets him talking about the problems he’s been having before announcing that he has a surprise and brings out the second guy.

As the two men answer his questions Titus makes affirmative noises and cuts over them with new questions. As those are being answered he throws things out to the floor, where Darren Young’s wandering around in the crowd holding a microphone. ‘Delicious’ Darren (Titus’s name for his partner) asks members of the crowd their opinion on the disagreement and moves on before he can be given an answer.

Back on the stage Titus wraps things up with his thought for the day, ignoring his guests and concentrating on himself. The name of the show? Titus.

This could work with the Prime Time Players as either faces or heels but would probably work best as the latter, with Titus using the segment as an in-character way of getting himself over. It’s exactly the sort of thing WWE puts on slower episodes of SmackDown and would have been a nice way of getting less important feuds on TV and giving The Prime Time Players something to do.

It would have been an entertaining use of the two. I’m confident it would have been more interesting that what they’ll end up doing as singles wrestlers. And that disappoints me. It’s another wasted opportunity from WWE: changing things for the sake of it instead of trying to make use of what they already have in place. As things stand right now I'm not expecting RAW to become The Titus O'Neil Show anytime soon.

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