17th Oct2019

WWE Network Original: ‘Ride Along 4×08 – Braun Takes Manhattan’ Review

by Chris Cummings

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If you haven’t watched an episode of WWE Ride Along, the concept is as simple as they come. A selection of WWE performers are filmed while they travel from city to city on various legs of their year-round live event tour. It’s been going on for a while now and seems to be an inexpensive way to provide an original program.

The latest episode see’s Braun Strowman, EC3 and Drake Maverick travelling together, and in another car, we see Mike and Maria Kanellis. The episodes generally last only 20 minutes or so, which can be a bit too fast, causing us to never really see many deep or meaningful conversations. This would, in all honesty, be a much better show if we spend an hour listening to road-stories with various WWE wrestlers as they drove from town-to-town, but instead we generally see travel partners joke around, often in a rather scripted manner, for just a few minutes. It’s an odd show.

This episode has Strowman pushing his substantial weight around, eating ice cream with Drake Maverick, calling at a food-stand for “street meat” and joking around with ECW and Drake as EC3 drives while saying very little. It feels scripted often, as with most episodes of this show, and they don’t reveal any interesting stories or show a real candid look at life on the road as a pro-wrestler. Mike and Maria have a more organic feeling segment, but then they should, they’re married. They joke with each other about Mike’s driving, his love of The Office, and other random things like that. Again, it’s not insightful and doesn’t show us anything that would last beyond the episode. I feel like Ride Along, while entertaining enough, is missing the point and could be a much better show.

If you put a dash-cam facing towards the wrestlers, let them chat for a couple of hours on a journey, edit it down to an hour, and listen to an unscripted chat about life on the road, about careers and fun tales from the highways and byways, then we’d have a much more memorable and interesting program on our hands, but instead we have… this. It’s nothing special, and this episode joins all the others as just another one. Not bad but not too good either.

Ride Along and its many episodes are available to watch now on WWE Network.

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