Corey Graves caused another stir on social media this week when he posted a pair of tweets during Monday Night Raw that were critical of what was happening on the show. The tweets, which read “No one cares” and “Wow. F*** this. Fire me. I’m already fired,” came during the Rusev vs. Bobby Lashley match that saw both Lana and Liv Morgan get involved. The roller coaster soap opera-esque storyline has been panned by critics, including Graves, for months, and yet WWE continues to move forward with it due to how much attention it gets from television viewers and online.
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Graves went through everything that frustrated him about the angle at the start of the After The Bell podcast on Thursday, starting with how uninterested the crowd looked.
“The entire crowd was silent,” Graves said. “Nobody was moving, nobody was clapping, it was complete apathy. Which in this business, is the worst thing you can have. You can be cheered, you can be booed — sure, not everything works. But to have an entire arena full of people not react to anything that was happening is a problem.”
He then addressed how Morgan has been used in the story. After weeks of pre-taped vignettes teasing her new character, Morgan arrived on WWE television two weeks back to reveal she had been in an lesbian relationship with Lana. During Monday’s match she confronted Lana at ringside, only to get thrown into a barricade.
“For weeks and weeks you have been promoting Liv Morgan and this return,” Graves said. “And Liv Morgan, I have said on this show, in my opinion is a star waiting to be born. She has this unusual reveal in the Lana/Lashley wedding, which everyone had an opinion one right, wrong or indifferent. For the last week or so she’s been promoting on social that she’s going to be in Rusev’s corner for this matchup. Liv’s absent until the final moments where she comes to the ring and gets Coke thrown in her face and beaten up by Lana.
“Tell me why anybody in the WWE Universe should pay attention or care about Liv Morgan now?” he added. “We’ve been told for weeks that she’s going to be important, she’s going to be a star. And the first time we see her do anything of consequence, she’s gets beaten up rather effortlessly by Lana.”
It was announced after the match that Rusev and Morgan would team up to face Lana and Lashley on next week’s Raw, but Graves pleaded with them to just let the feud end. He then talked about how the storyline is being compared to the Attitude Era, something many fans online seem to want to become the norm on WWE television again.
Graves argued that what made The Attitude Era great wasn’t the lewd storylines and profanity, but rather the quality of the wrestlers on the roster and their ability to connect with fans regardless of storyline.
“There were a ton of awful, horrendous storylines,” Graves said. :Mae Young gave birth to a hand. There was Katie Vick. Some of the worst storylines in the history of the business took place in the Attitude Era. But as a whole, the business was on fire because everyone had to step up, even if you were in a garbage circumstance, you had an opportunity to make your own path. That’s what we need, that’s what we as fans miss from the Attitude Era.”
