On November 18, 2025, "Nevermore: The Raven Effect" was released on Amazon Prime. It's a documentary that follows the life and career of Scott Levy, better known by many wrestling fans as Raven, who has since gone down as one of the most influential characters of his generation. Raven came along at a time when wrestling was in need of a transition, a change, something radically different to the vastly popular (if not a little kid-friendly) era of the late 1980s and early 1990s. He was a dirty, grungy character who took the sadness and trauma of his own childhood and inflicted all of that pain on whoever he was around, whether they were a friend or an opponent.
After an iconic run in ECW and a serviceable run in WCW, Raven eventually brought the character to WWE in 2000, and a lot of people were excited to see what he could do in a company that at the time was firing on all cylinders. However, Raven's WWE run did not reach the heights that he had elsewhere. Instead of bringing the best out of his character, WWE slotted Raven into the company's Hardcore division to lean in to his past with ECW. While he would win the WWE Hardcore Championship a total of 27 times (which is a rough total as Raven claims its much more), primarily due to the 24/7 rule that was attached to it, Raven didn't achieve anywhere near the success he had in ECW, or even in WCW for that matter.
With Raven's life currently on full display thanks to his new documentary, which covers everything from his wrestling career to his battles with physical and mental illness that are still ongoing, there isn't a better time than now to take a look at what went wrong with the Raven character in WWE, and explain why he deserved more from that run.
By the time Raven left WWE in 2003, one thing was very clear: the company simply didn't understand who his character was.
Former ECW head booker Paul Heyman described the Raven character as perhaps the best he's ever had the privilege of booking, but also revealed during a live Q&A session with "Inside The Ropes" that the reason why no one would be able to get the best out of Raven apart from him was because he knew the character inside and out. Heyman would sit down with Scott Levy to discuss every last detail about the Raven character. That includes the way he moved, the way he treated people, why he treated people that way, what made him the man that ECW fans would grow to hate, why a man wrapped up in so much torment who would usually generate sympathy from the fans generated the complete opposite.
In order to book the character, the booker first needed to understand Raven, and outside of Heyman and Levy, no one knew what to do with such a complex figure; not Eric Bischoff, not Vince McMahon, not Vince Russo, and not even people like Dusty Rhodes or Gabe Sapolsky who arguably got the best out of Raven while working with him in TNA and Ring of Honor during the 2000s.
To put it simply, a character like Raven was never going to be able to thrive, or even survive, in a company like WWE. Even in the landscape of the "Attitude Era," Raven was too dark and too nuanced to truly be explored at time where "car crash television" was in vogue. It also didn't help that Raven didn't really have the support from those in positions of power, which brings us to...
Years before the Raven character was conceived, Scott Levy had worked for WCW and WWE under a variety of different names. In WCW, he wrestled as Scott The Body, Scotty Flamingo, and Scott Anthony, while he portrayed the character of Johnny Polo in WWE. Levy's time with both companies didn't last long as he disagreed with WCW booker Bill Watts so much that he quit the company, and when it came to his exit from WWE in 1994, he left after having backstage heat, multiple run-ins with people in positions of power, and most famously, getting on the wrong side of Vince McMahon after taking a young Shane McMahon out drinking and partying.
Naturally, this meant that when Levy returned to WWE in 2000 as the Raven character, there were some people who weren't too pleased. The most notable person who was not only angry, but confused about the signing was Vince himself, who according to Raven in an interview with "Title Match Wrestling," said in a creative meeting "Who the f*** hired Johnny Polo?" From that point on, Raven knew he wasn't meant to last in WWE. He has stated that the locker room was set up in a way where if wrestlers were brought in from ECW or WCW, they were undermined and not treated fairly, which didn't help during the invasion storyline in 2001.
Raven tried to make the best out of a bad situation, even having a near year-long story on "WWE Sunday Night Heat" where he would try and earn his way back on to "WWE Raw,"only to be squashed on his return to Monday nights, and virtually stripped of anything that made Raven the man who everyone knew in the first place. Raven was a character that caught the cultural zeitgeist when he arrived in ECW, but by the time he got to WWE, it simply wasn't his time anymore.
