Number 1 - John Bradshaw Layfield

First things first – I like John Bradshaw Layfield as a character. Now this admission may make him an odd first subject for WWTT but I have my reasons.

The first reason is the timing issue. One week he is APA Bradshaw – beer drinking low budget Stone Cold Steve Austin. He’s an ass kicking babyface who doesn’t sell much and gets the odd PPV match and the odd big pop. The next week he’s JBL – rich Texan New Yorker with more money than guts and a fine line in Ted DiBiase meets JR Ewing promos. It doesn’t matter that we know that John Bradshaw Layfield is much closer to the read John Layfield than Bradshaw was. What matters is that there was no gap. There was no explanation. Aside from the book that he released about personal finance (and who would buy a personal finance book from APA Bradshaw?) there was no clue that something lay beneath the drunken exterior.

The time to launch the character would’ve been when Bradshaw returned from his lengthy injury. You know – when he came back with that god-awful hair cut. A hair cut that is perfect for his new character. But by creating this half way Bradshaw they lost the ability to have him be fresh in the eyes of the fans. They see it for what it is – a bad piece of writing that wouldn’t be tolerated on any other prime time show. You wouldn’t get an actor playing two different roles in two back to back episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Fans feel insulted when WWE assumes they’re too stupid to see the total lack of logic in what they’re doing. If Undertaker can have four months off to change his character (i.e. put on a hat) then surely they could’ve done without Bradshaw for a couple of months to build to the "debut" of JBL.

The second baffling part about JBL is the WWE management apparently deciding that he would headline the May PPV before JBL had even appeared on TV. This is the kind of booking madness which gave us Mabel as a main eventer. Fans like to think they’re getting the main events that they have been demanding. They don’t like it when they visibly (and audibly) reject something and management are so hard headed that they keep pushing it regardless.

So I do like John Bradshaw Layfield and it’s good to see them pushing something different. Certainly something better than Eugene. But they’ve got their plan all wrong. The timing is so out it is almost laughable. With a couple of months totally away, a month of vignettes to build him up and then some interviews and matches where he works a different style it might have worked as a slow build to a PPV match. By ramming it down peoples throats and, at the same time, alienating the small but important internet audience they have ruined the character’s chances, forced hundreds of thousands of viewers to turn off and produced television that has received scathing reviews. The moral of this story is that John Bradshaw Layfield has his place on Smackdown but he should never never never be the whole of Smackdown.