Daniel Bryan’s Anger Management And Why It Was A Good Idea

This was a segment on the show last night and if you haven’t checked it out, please do so.  There are three parts to it and the final part with Kane giving his life story is some of the funniest stuff I’ve heard on Raw in at least the past year.  But there’s something else I wanted to talk about regarding this.When he first came to WWE, Daniel Bryan was about as dull as you could get.  He was a guy in trunks that could do a lot of submissions and that’s it.  For roughly a year he did nothing significant before he won the world title out of nowhere.  That was ok but it still didn’t quite work.  Then he started saying YES.  Then he started saying NO.  Now he has anger management issues and he’s probably getting the biggest reactions on the roster.

Last night’s segment was another example of why this push is working: WWE is giving time, effort and thought to making this new character work.  There’s a backstory to Bryan’s new persona and it has a logical progression to it.  Instead of just throwing it out there like the Hawkins/Reks stripper thing that happened out of nowhere with a flimsy reason (they wanted to get noticed), we’ve watched Bryan go from nothing to a guy with confidence to a guy who was paranoid to a guy with anger issues and IT WORKED.

The segment last night was a great way to build on the character as they took him out of the arena setting and showed us something different.  That’s a major problem with WWE today: everything is in the arena.  It’s like a sitcom in that way and it gets really monotonous.  Look back to the 80s: you would see people EVERYWHERE.  Off the top of my head I can think of segments in a control room, on a farm, in a country house, in a store, in a weight room, in a kitchen, and in the woods.  Those are the kinds of segments that build up characters and make them memorable.  Think of it like this: what do you remember more: something you did once, or something you did a hundred times?

In short, do more stuff like the anger management session and mix up these segments a bit.  It will work wonders for character development and it’ll freshen up a lot of stuff on the shows.

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