The tag champs were often treated like jokes getting beat in minutes by bigger stars, a lot more than you remember. Title reigns lasted very short periods, hence why Edge and Christian had so many reigns, they lost the title's pretty quickly.
The big PPV's they had a chance to shine but week to week tag teams were not particularly well used. It's something that is somewhat noticeable when you look back. It's again a case of the people carrying it not the booking, you do that type of booking to todays tag teams, and no one care about them. We know this because that is in fact what they are doing.
Pretty much. I heard a comment that the Rock being such a star is a bit of a curse because they do the same booking he had with every top face, except no one is anywhere close to the star the Rock was, so it never works the same, and it makes your faces look like idiots
Yup, they won the titles in Mania 17 and lost them on the second Smackdown after Mania to Taker & Kane in a complete throwaway match.
And like you said, the segments involving main event stars were really good, the midcard stuff doesn't nearly stand the test of time at all and it was really only entertaining because the stars were more over so bad stuff generally looked better. I challenge anyone to go watch the "This is your Life" segment and tell me they are entertained with it, it is just that Rock and Foley were gods on the mic, that people found it entertaining back then.
At least from 2002-04, the midcard had very strong matches and the storylines hold better, (the midcard in the Attitude Era was garbage till 2000 when they signed Jericho, Angle, Benoit, Guerrero and had E&C, Hardyz and Dudleyz for the tag team)yet you still have some RAWs, Smackdowns and PPVs that were absolute stinkers and some storlyines like Al Wilson and Dawn Marie or Katie Vick or HLA, these were downright horrible and didn't age well at all.
The reason why I like AEW is that at least they try to be different and with their win/loss record, at least it makes it easy to build feuds especially without trying the whole dated authority figure storyline. NXT is very good wrestling wise, but I feel they have been hotshoting their storylines to respond to AEW's rating success and it worked for them two weeks in a row but I don't think it is sustainable. Neither has been helped by the pandemic and the absence of audience in the crowd. Meanwhile RAW & SD are just unwatchable right now and only target a 70 year old, out of touch man. I can barely watch 10 minutes before turning them off.
