[Emperor Smeat]

More recent stuff from the Observer mainly about Total Divas:

The latest word is that the pre-show match might be Cesaro vs. RVD

While it's successful reality TV so far, every single solitary person within wrestling who has commented on the show to me—including, I should note, people who were involved in the production of it—hate the show passionately. The only person in WWE who has spoken out has been Dolph Ziggler. Most of the wrestlers were overseas last week so they didn't see episode one, but many of them saw episode two and thought it was awful. There is the feeling that you don't speak out about it because it's the Bellas' vehicle, and Nikki is dating Cena, and if it gets back to Cena that's the end of your push. Dolph either didn't get the memo or didn't care.

The word we got from Raw Monday is that Eva Marie is PASSIONATELY hated. Which means she'll probably be pushed hard on the main roster very soon. It was noted that the only person who arguably came off worse than Eva was Ariane, AKA Cameron. But one WWE source said, "Cameron is an idiot, but everyone in the company already knows that so it's nothing new."

The one thing that was real on the show was the tears by Eva Marie when she met with Steph at the end. Obviously the storyline where she lied about her dance background in the hopes that she'd be chosen to be Fandango's permanent dancer was fake from start to finish. But when they started putting the show together they got word that while Stephanie was always super busy on Mondays (she has kids so she's usually only around on TV days) she'd make time if they could come up with a good storyline for the show. So I don't know exactly what they told Eva, but she went into the office with the idea that she'd done something really bad and that Stephanie was pissed at her. Steph was in character the entire time but Eva didn't know that, which was why we got the real tears on television. There were wrestlers who were laughing at the storyline, since it's damn near impossible to get any time with Stephanie at all on Monday but it was played up on Total Divas like it was no problem.