There was something that just felt slightly off during SmackDown Live's two-hour broadcast Tuesday.
At first it seemed like it might have something to do with the scheduled main event getting mothballed because AJ Styles got dinged up during a spectacular performance in his WWE world championship TLC match against Dean Ambrose. That said, things were sewed up pretty nicely, if a bit late in the show, with an Ambrose versus The Miz Intercontinental championship match.
Rather, it was something much deeper -- SmackDown simply felt small.
Granted, it's terribly unfair to expect much in the way of change just two days after a pay-per-view that left its fair share of loose ends. Without Styles' injury, his showdown with James Ellsworth and Ambrose's inevitable involvement would have moved forward a story that still has some legs left to it. The Wyatt Family had to wrap up its business with former champions Heath Slater and Rhyno, and the conflict between new SmackDown women's champion Alexa Bliss and Becky Lynch seems far from over, leaving a lot left to do.
But for as long as SmackDown was able to get away with Miz-Dolph Ziggler, because of the quality of each match and the wrinkles in the story, and for as long as Styles-Ambrose-Ellsworth will carry on forward, the powers that be have been able to gloss over the fact that they have a roster that's pretty stiff and unmalleable.
There doesn't seem to be another worthy contender lined up for Styles at some point in the future when the well runs dry with Ellsworth and Ambrose, especially with Bray Wyatt and Randy Orton locked into the tag team titles. And as much I enjoy the Wyatt Family giving some gravitas to those tag team championships, unless you want to continuously have them beating up and devaluing both American Alpha and The Usos week after week, the solution for an interesting next step outside of an internal conflict doesn't seem to be easy.
Except Shane McMahon and The Undertaker, who both seem highly unlikely to compete on a regular weekly basis, you have 32 active male competitors on the SmackDown roster. That number shrinks quickly when you pair off tag teams (American Alpha, The Usos, Slater and Rhyno, Breezango, The Ascension, The Vaudevillains, The Spirit Squad and The Hype Bros) where neither guy seems likely to ascend to a top-level singles feud any time soon. That leaves you with 16 capable singles wrestlers, including John Cena, who has been gone from TV for some time and seems unlikely to return much earlier than the Royal Rumble.
So let's say that the WWE has 15 active male wrestlers to use on a week-to-week basis until at least mid-January, and six on the women's side.
Even if you're able to keep the plates in the air until Royal Rumble, when most of the paths to WrestleMania start to become defined, simply producing 14 hours of television to that point will lead to most potential permutations of those 15 wrestlers at least crossing paths, to say nothing of actual matches. While Miz-Ambrose was a fresh feud, with the only televised match between the two since a pair of early summer showdowns a tag team match also involving Styles and Cena, the number of times they've interacted on Miz TV and backstage makes it feel a little too familiar already.
The long-term solution for maintaining a small roster is a fairly regular roster turnover. As both myself and Brian Campbell have alluded to multiple times, this can easily be accomplished by having trades between the two rosters, which has been teased over the last month but not yet acted upon. You could also have a pro sports-like call-up and send-down system with NXT and maybe even 205 Live, which would alleviate some of the stress of an injury or a stalling storyline in a hurry.
While SmackDown Live has managed to produce a stellar product with seemingly limited resources since the brand separation, a time is coming in which there's going to be a need for a major shakeup in order to keep all of the top stars and titles sufficiently and entertainingly occupied.
Hits and misses
• The opening of SmackDown Live, which featured Daniel Bryan talking to a delusional Ellsworth on Talking Smack immediately following the TLC pay-per-view, said it best. "I think AJ Styles is going to hurt you, and then I think Dean Ambrose is really going to hurt you."
Taking Ellsworth's turn and twisting it in a way that makes what happened to Ambrose his own fault was a creative step to take, and the delay of the world title match (along with what happened in the main event Tuesday) will actually allow Ellsworth's delusion and Ambrose's anger to stew for another week, which should do both elements a world of good. Ambrose's opening gauntlet with Ellsworth, in which he walked briskly to the ring, hit "Dirty Deeds" and walked right back up the ramp, was a return to the no-nonsense side of Ambrose, which we also saw on Miz TV.
The Miz laying the blame of the outcome of the TLC world title match squarely at Ambrose's feet was just the right touch of cold honesty. "The guy you treated like a puppet finally cut the strings and fought back. Don't you think you deserved it?" On the back of some previous promos, the Miz Participation award was another nice touch, and a great cue for Bryan to come out to poke the bear. Dropping Miz into another impromptu Intercontinental championship match was yet another example of what some have called Bryan's tendency to "be a heel to the heels". With each passing week, and no thought of Bryan getting back in the ring, it gets more and more interesting to see what the payoff of this conflict will be.
Finally, the Maryse-Ellsworth interaction was crucial to the outcome here, and a good end to a solid main event. The combination of the look Ambrose shot Ellsworth when he realized that the chin-less wonder had cost him another title and the slow realization on Ellsworth's face as he high-tailed it to the back was Grade-A storytelling.
• While there's still some timing kinks to iron out, the new Wyatt Family entrance video and entrance song combination, which features the opening note to Orton's old entrance theme followed by a brief clip of his new theme into the classic Wyatt song, was well put together. With the new video, it likely means that any doubts of this team staying together (at least in the mid-term) should be quelled.
As for the tag-team title rematch, the outcome never felt like it was in any peril. Both Rhyno and Slater seemed to take control for a brief moment or two, but they felt overmatched throughout. Eventually, Wyatt set Slater up for Sister Abigail and then tagged Orton in to toss Slater right into an RKO for the victory. It might take a little while to become official, but every indication was given during Talking Smack that Rhyno's set to walk away from his tag-team partner. Won't somebody think of the kids?
• A heel-against-heel matchup in the women's division seemed like it would have been a nice touch, and Natalya is another great wrestler for Carmella to get into the ring with, but the match never started and simply led to a Nikki Bella-Natalya stare-down based on Carmella's accusations against Natalya. It feels most likely that Natalya was the Survivor Series attacker, but who knows? Only time will tell.
Later in the show, Alexa Bliss' celebration party was a bit lackluster and didn't last long after the pyrotechnic celebration. Becky Lynch came out to get her rematch, both women used witch and a word that rhymes with it and Bliss turned tail at the first sign of danger.
• Baron Corbin got another win over Kalisto with a really cool transition; as Kalisto spun around his body several times -- a traditional lucha libre spot -- Corbin spun him directly into an End of Days. I'm likely not smart enough to find good reasoning for these guys to continue to battle, and it sounds a bit hypocritical in light of my other points (and considering how definitively Corbin won Tuesday's rematch after a surprisingly enjoyable chairs match at TLC), but Kalisto has helped Corbin to some of the best matches of his WWE run, and could continue to do so.
• The tag-team division had to pick up some of the slack, but it suffered from that same problem of familiarity. The Hype Bros beat The Ascension, and Chad Gable got a singles win against Tyler Breeze. In the end, very little changed.