3 Hours Of Raw Entertainment?

This was the first regular 3-hour episode of Raw. Last week was special, since it was the 1000th episode. This week, back to business as usual. This time, however, with a whole extra hour to work with.

How did they do? Some people speculated that the first hour would be some kind of "pre-show" to hype up the regular two hours. That was not the case. It is indeed an extra hour of what you would expect from Raw. I am glad that they did not feature too much Tout moments on the show. That thing can get annoying very fast. Of course, they did bring up the fact that they had a fire multiple times during the show. I understand you can't completely ignore it, but mentioning it twice throughout the entire show would have been enough. There were a lot of recaps of various things throughout the show.

One of the things I was hoping with the extra hour is more midcarders getting used. How did they do in that department? I wasn't impressed. A few midcarders did get featured, like Sandow, Tensai, and so on, but they should be developing legitimate feuds and storylines with them. Besides that, keep in mind that there were some workers not featured. No Ryback? What about Sin Cara? What do you do when Wade Barrett returns? Only feature these guys on Smackdown? With a whole extra hour on Raw, you would think that at least 2 more midcard storylines or feuds get proper development.

There was one thing that was recapped multiple times on Raw that really annoyed me. Triple H and Brock Lesnar's confrontation. I can understand hyping the entire segment from last week. I can understand doing it again once more later in the show to hype Summerslam. But it is ridiculous when you stop and realize that this feud is becoming more hype than substance. You spend so many weeks hyping that Heyman is not going to have Brock face Triple H. Obviously, that leads to the moment the match is actually made. What are they going to do from now to Summerslam? Continue to show that same segment from last week? Have more promos about Brock destroying Triple H and Triple H not being afraid? The feud between John Cena and The Rock was much better than this. Giving my personal reason why, it is because The Rock went back to what he does best, entertaining. He brought those entertaining promos. For some people, the fact that the feud spilled over on the Internet may have helped. This feud did a better job at reaching out to the fans. Which side would the fans take? In this feud between Triple H and Lesnar, the guy you are supposed to cheer for is obviously Triple H. Can he conquer the beast? The path of this feud is just so dull. As of right now, it is not worthy to close Summerslam.