The Survivor Series pay-per-view has been a staple of WWE’s programming since 1987, at which point the high-profile event—usually considered one of the four most important shows the billion-dollar company puts on each year—was held on Thanksgiving Day. With a ceaseless flow of content pouring endlessly from CEO Vince McMahon’s streaming service, there’s undoubtedly been something less special about Survivor Series than there was back in the day. But this year, due to both a series of bizarre happenstances and geopolitical nightmares, Survivor Series has been revitalized with new energy from an invading cast of NXT characters challenging WWE’s flagship entertainers. How did this all go down in the first place, and what, exactly, is at stake?
Survivor Series events traditionally feature an elaborate elimination tag match as its main attraction, a stipulation that took on new meaning in 2016 when WWE re-split their roster in half for the sake of establishing two distinctive brands, Raw and SmackDown. The two brands were then pitted against each other specifically and exclusively for the show.
The conceit of Survivor Series is fun in theory, but in practice one can’t help but feel a sense of existential malaise around the whole thing. Raw and SmackDown have always been rather interchangeable, meaning that no one had any real reason to root for one team or the other—and there was never an established prize for the victor anyway. With the recent and completely absurd advent of the semi-abandoned Wild Card Rule, stars were hopping from one brand to the other, making allegiance to either the Red or Blue team completely irrelevant. And besides, both sides help line McMahon’s pockets. So what exactly is the point?
But now that NXT—a show with an entirely different aesthetic and creative team behind it—has been moved from WWE’s streaming service to actual television, a new competitor has entered the fray. For the very first time, NXT has now been put on the same playing field as Raw and SmackDown, and the lesser-known stars have a lot to prove as they’ve now been recognized as a third team in this year’s PPV. That means the Survivor Series matchups this go around are indeed much rarer, since crossovers from the WWE’s main roster into NXT are few and far between. And fans have projected a lot onto NXT and its leader, Triple H, who they see as harbingers of a new generation of pro wrestling divorced from the chicanery and rigamarole of WWE’s more mainstream products.