YMMV / Survivor Series

• Fan Nickname: 2019's event has been dubbed "NXT Takeover: Survivor Series" due to NXT being involved in the Pay-Per-View for the first time.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Mr. Perfect turned face to team with Randy Savage against Ric Flair and Razor Ramon at Survivor Series '92. By the time Survivor Series '93 rolled around, Perfect had retired, Razor was a face, and Savage was on Razor's team as the replacement for Mr. Perfect.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: The ending of the 2015 event was basically a rehash of SummerSlam 2013. While this was probably the main reason why the angle was badly received, it didn't help that the guy who cashed in (Sheamus) had been regarded as irrelevant for months, while the guy he cashed in on (Roman Reigns) didn't have even close to the level of popularity that Daniel Bryan had (he was popular enough for people to feel bad for him, certainly, but not enough to get behind him all the way), and even less than the other finalist (Dean Ambrose) had, and many feel he's better off being a heel anyway.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: The 1997 event is forever known as the Montreal Screwjob.
• Seasonal Rot: The core concept of Survivor Series has become completely irrelevant over the years as it has shifted from being clashes between teams of wrestlers who have a beef with each other, to RAW competing against SmackDown in "brand warfare" for nothing more than bragging rights, with teams made up of faces and heels from each brand being thrown together to fight for the pride of the show, irrespective of their own stories. This was undermined even more by the regular WWE Draft, and reached a nadir in 2021 when all four (two men's and two women's) teams were literally announced wholesale on Twitter a mere three weeks after the last draft, leading to people pointing out that the entire RAW men's team was made up of wrestlers who'd been on SmackDown less than a month earlier, now talking about how they have to win for the pride of RAW. Even more ridiculously, authority figure Adam Pearce appeared on RAW talking about how essential it is that RAW wins for brand pride... despite the fact that he's the authority on both RAW and SmackDown. At this point, the matches could well be very entertaining, but it's impossible to care about them any more.
• Signature Scene:
  • 1990: The debut of The Undertaker.
  • 1991: The Undertaker winning his first WWF title.
  • 1992: Bret Hart vs. Shawn Michaels
  • 1994: Bob Backlund winning the WWF title.
  • 1995: Bret Hart ending Diesel's one year run as WWF Champion.
  • 1996: The debut of The Rock (then known as Rocky Maivia) or Stone Cold vs Bret Hart.
  • 1997: The Montreal Screwjob.
  • 1998: The Rock winning his first WWF championship.
  • 1999: Stone Cold being ran over by a car.
  • 2000: Stone Cold vs. Triple H, especially in the end where Austin uses a forklift to drop down the car with Triple H in it.
  • 2001: Team WWF defeating the Alliance to end The InVasion Angle.
  • 2002: The inaugural Elimination Chamber.
  • 2003: Goldberg retaining his first title or The Undertaker being buried by Kane.
  • 2004: Team Eddie Guerrero defeating Team Kurt Angle or Randy Orton becoming the Sole Survivor of his team for the second straight year.
  • 2005: The Undertaker returning to interrupt Team SmackDown/Randy Orton's celebration. (Orton was the sole survivor for the third straight year)
  • 2006: All five members of Team DX surviving their match. Michaels took out Mike Knox in seconds right off the bat.
  • 2007: Edge's surprise return during Batista and The Undertaker's Hell in a Cell World Heavyweight Championship match.
  • 2008: John Cena winning his first World Heavyweight championship (his fourth World Title overall).
  • 2009: Christian rapping about his status for being his team's Token White.
  • 2010: John Cena being (temporarily) fired from WWE for helping Randy Orton retain the WWE Championship against Nexus leader Wade Barrett.
  • 2011: Either The Rock's first match in nearly 8 years or the beginning of CM Punk's 434-day title reign.
  • 2012: The debut of The Shield.
  • 2013: Daniel Bryan and CM Punk teaming-up to take on The Wyatt Family.
  • 2014: The debut of Sting or the (temporary) firing of The Authority (thanks to Sting's assistance to Team Cena's last man standing Dolph Ziggler).
  • 2015: Roman Reigns winning the title only for Sheamus to cash in his Money in the Bank briefcase and win the title for himself, and the livid crowd's reaction.
  • 2016: Goldberg squashing Brock Lesnar in less than two minutes.
  • 2017: Either Brock Lesnar vs. AJ Styles, or The Shield vs. The New Day, in the former's first PPV match since reuniting.
  • 2018: Either Charlotte Flair giving a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown to Ronda Rousey, or Drake Maverick wetting his pants during the tag team match.
  • 2019: Rey Mysterio and his son double teaming (read: Stereo 619ing) Brock Lesnar.
  • 2020: The Undertaker's final farewell, as well as Roman Reigns vs. Drew McIntyre.
  • 2021: Becky Lynch vs. Charlotte Flair, mainly due to the real life heat between the two at the time.
  • 2022: Jey Uso hugging Sami Zayn during the WarGames match, after months of animosity.
  • 2023: The return of CM Punk.
• Signature Song: "Good Feeling", the 2011 theme. If that is disqualified due to Soundtrack Dissonance, then the title goes to "Control", the 2001 theme, or "Always", the 2002 theme.
  • Black Sabbath's "War Pigs" is becoming one in recent years, having been used for both the 2022 and 2023 iterations of the show, each of which centered around a pair of War Games matches.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • The ending of the 2015 event. Sure, a heel turn would have been predictable, but that isn't a bad thing — in fact, it would've been interesting and would have refreshed the main product of the company, more so than putting it on a guy who had been booked into oblivion throughout 2015 and had already won multiple world titles such as Sheamus, yet failed to get over enough to justify any one of them. The fans, knowing this and seeing that the company would rather play it safe and keep churning out the same stale programming rather than try something new and invigorating, made it blatantly clear that they weren't having any of it and started leaving in droves. It probably didn’t help that the title had been on an Authority-associated superstar (Seth Rollins, who'd been forced to vacate the title after blowing out his knee at a house show in Dublin) for months and the fans wanted a change.
  • The two Survivor Series elimination matches that were on the 2015 card (well, one was on the pre-show) were quite clearly hastily thrown together just so the name of the PPV wouldn't be a misnomer and had practically no build-up. Directly after this PPV, at least three four-man stables formed and started feuding amongst themselves and The Wyatt Family (who at Survivor Series itself had been relegated to lose to the Brothers of Destruction (The Undertaker and Kane) in celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Undertaker's WWE career) — a perfect set up for Survivor Series. This was mercilessly lampshaded to no end by what seemed to be every smark on the Internet.
  • Some have even noted that the company seems capable of setting up a traditional Survivor Series match for every PPV except for Survivor Series. Especially notable for the two years that the Bragging Rights PPV was around. It aired the month before Survivor Series and featured matches that would have been right at home on the event.
  • The 2017 men's 5-on-5 had two matchups that the fans were salivating to see: Raw's Finn Balor against his old NXT rival, Smackdown's Shinsuke Nakamura, and Raw's Triple H versus Smackdown's Bobby Roode for the first time ever. Balor and Nakamura did a few callbacks to their NXT headgames and New Japan feuds, with the fans screaming like crazy for it, but Nakamura was eliminated by Braun Strowman in a squash about six seconds later. Triple H vs Roode has been an internet dream match for a long time, with Roode during his TNA years being compared to Hunter in his prime, and not only was the crowd amped as hell, Balor and Samoa Joe were on the ring apron visibly marking out. Yet again, there was only a short back-and-forth before Cena and Strowman tagged in.
    • The end of said match had Strowman, fed up with Triple H's showboating in the finish of the match, pinning The Game in the corner of the ring in a vicious "The Reason You Suck" Speech with tones of borderline murder in his voice. This would be just about the last time two would interact on-screen period before Triple H's 2022 retirement with no semblance of a follow up feud to this show-closing interaction.
• Tough Act to Follow: The 2019 event was absolutely covered from top to bottom with amazing matches, with the Women's Championship Triple Threat Match commented as not living up to the hype that included a Women's Survivor Match, The Fiend vs. Daniel Bryan, Pete Dunne vs. Adam Cole, and Rey Mysterio vs. Brock Lesnar.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Sgt. Slaughter's Iraqi heel act at Survivor Series 1990 is very dated today, though Sarge did a good job on his promo and getting the drama across.
• Win Back the Crowd: The 2016 edition was seen as a massive improvement over the previous year's event. It was noted that the traditional elimination matches had much better storytelling and unpredictability (the men's one, despite clocking in at almost an hour was widely praised as one of the best Survivor Series matches of all time). It helped that, by this time, WWE had finally ended the Authority angle.