WWE is well known for reinventing history when they need to, and if they can portray things like the Monday Night War as an innocent, wide-eyed company being attacked by a greedy businessman like Ted Turner, then why shouldn’t they? But for the latest episode of WWE/24, “Women’s Evolution,” I think they should have waited a bit longer before celebrating their “equal” treatment of men and women.

For one thing, the WWE/24 commentators spent a lot of time mourning over the meer minutes of time that women used to get on TV. What exactly do they have now? While Sasha won her title on Raw’s first episode after the draft, over on Smackdown there wasn’t even a women’s match (not to mention a title) after the draft. They also talk about what a huge step forward it was to have two women’s matches at Wrestlemania 32, but considering that one of them was a thrown together ten woman tag match on the pre-show of a seven hour pay per view, I’m not sure that’s worth celebrating. The documentary also highlights the Divas Search as being “two steps back” from the days Lita and Trish were main eventing Raw. WWE may have forgotten, but it was only last year during Wrestlemania that they announced the reality show competition was coming back.

What bothered me most about the “Women’s Evolution” documentary was the way Stephanie and all of the other commentators treated the difficult years of mud wrestling and evening gown matches as if it was just some force of nature that swept through WWE and thankfully it’s now over. They lower their heads and look wistfully down at the ground while talking about how bad it was, but they never address why it was so bad to begin with or any particular reason it was changed, other than talking about how the women working there are great now (there have always been talented female wrestlers) or that there are so many women doing great things now around the world, like Jennifer Lawrence being an actress. My issue with this is that if racy TV shows and movies like “Jerry Springer” and “Girls Gone Wild” become popular again, I have no doubt that WWE will instantly flip back over, feeding us lines about how empowering it was for Sable to take her clothes off in the ring when Marc Mero didn’t want her too.

The documentary did have some feel good moments of Becky, Charlotte, and Sasha taking in the whole Wrestlemania experience and being front and center in the AT&T Stadium banner, and I think it’s important to show popular male wrestlers like Seth Rollins, Triple H and Big E talking about how women deserve more respect and equal pay (even if Big E qualified it with “if they’re bringing in revenue and if the fans are into it”, which is problematic because a lot of that depends on how much time and attention the higher ups give them on TV to begin with). Overall though I think WWE needs to focus less on self congratulatory documentaries about not cancelling women’s matches at Wrestlemania and focus more on giving women consistent storylines, characters, and amounts of TV time on a week-to-week basis.

I should point out that the third panel above is from the “Talking Smack” episode that aired right before WWE/24, where Becky kept talking about wanting a Women’s championship and more time, and Bryan and Renee followed up by asking what she thought of Eva Marie.