WWE Raw finally revealed what was behind Kurt Angle's "mystery text" storyline, and as it turns out, Angle has a storyline son: The newest member of Raw, Jason Jordan.
The big reveal, that Angle had an illegitimate son who turned out to be a WWE superstar, continued a recent trend of WWE's creative team booking angles straight out of the soap operas. Alicia Fox's on-and-off relationship with Noam Dar on 205 Live, the cliffhanger of who was attacking Enzo Amore and Big Cass and the recent drama between The Miz and Maryse serve as prime examples of WWE going full-blown melodramatic with a number of its recent storylines.
Angle being revealed as Jordan's storyline father is just another case of WWE utilizing sensational storylines to increase interest and add intrigue to a show characterized by what can often be run-of-the-mill booking, where one superstar feuds with another without any real motivation behind it. But WWE has turned up the volume on its programming over the last few months, increasing the amount of over-the-top storylines and, well, sheer ridiculousness.
And guess what? It appears to be working.
Take, for example, the "Who attacked Enzo and Cass?" storyline that had quite the obvious ending of Cass being outed as the attacker but still managed to pull in huge numbers for WWE. According to WrestlingNewsWorld.com, the June 20th edition of Raw, "which was headlined by a segment involving Kurt Angle, Corey Graves, Enzo Amore, and Big Cass, drew 3,102,000 viewers. This is up 22% from last week's show, and breaks the 7-week streak of averaging under 3 million." That segment also generated a whopping 3.5 million views on YouTube.
Eric Bischoff once wrote a book called Controversy Creates Cash. And it appears that, at the very least, controversy creates interest in the world of pro wrestling.
Consider that the very same episode of Raw highlighted by Enzo's big heel turn also featured Roman Reigns' SummerSlam announcement, yet another angle built around the mystery of Reigns' message and the anticipation that it would lead to the return of Braun Strowman. The rivalry between Strowman vs. Reigns has, of course, been a true throwback to feuds from the Attitude Era, an intense battle highlighted by 1990s-esque scene of ambulances being tipped over by a monstrous heel and crashed by a polarizing babyface.
These are the type of storylines that made Raw such a viewership hit in the late 1990s, and WWE seems to be reverting back to Bischoff's old adage that controversy indeed creates cash, which is something that the Angle/Jordan relationship may ultimately do.
The idea of pushing these controversial angles hasn't been exclusive to Raw, either. SmackDown recently built its programming around the drama surrounding a man, James Ellsworth, "winning" the first-ever women's Money in the Bank match for Carmella at the Money in the Bank pay-per-view, and WWE slyly parlayed the storyline into a debate about whether or not it is still stuck in its old ways of portraying its women as inferior to the men.