It reminded me of WCW/Monday Night Wars era stuff. I just don’t understand what Tony Kahn possibly thinks AEW will gain by airing the All In stuff, apparently they are now issuing copyright strikes against the footage being uploaded on YouTube. Wonder if the ITV showing this week will have the footage edited out also?
Tony Khan is a net positive for the pro wrestling industry. I truly believe the start of AEW was the shot in the arm the pro wrestling industry needed.
But this was the absolute gooseberry fools and was as WCW as it gets blending very, very real situations with storyline. Straight trash.
It was always pretty cringey when AEW would make references to their competition when WWE was absolute shite, it’s just embarrassing to do it when the competition is in the middle of its biggest boom in decades.
Their own crowd didn’t even seem to care really. The look on Tony Schiavone’s face after the footage aired was also one that screamed “I’ve been here before”.
Prototype wrote:Tony Khan is a net positive for the pro wrestling industry. I truly believe the start of AEW was the shot in the arm the pro wrestling industry needed....
You’ve got to be in a position of strength. The WWF learned their lesson in 1996; WCW unfortunately never learned their lesson and from 1998 and beyond their WWF references routinely backfired on them.
If you’re going to bury the competition, you’ve got to be the company that evidently has the better programme, the hotter show, the bigger stars. If your show looks lesser than, as the WWF did in 1996, and you’re out there with Kane dressed up as Diesel and running Billionaire Ted skits featuring parodies of the stars you’ve just lost - and that are now massively relevant in the other company, which in turn are being used against you in one of their own storylines - you’ve gone and strawberry floated up.
You can say AEW has the more talented roster, or the best technical wrestlers, or whatever you want to say, but like Shawn Michaels, Bret Hart, Mankind, The Rock, Steve Austin and so on in 1995, 1996, they’re not the stars yet. It was the nWo. It was Hogan. It was Randy Savage. It was Piper. WWF got absolutely nowhere telling the viewer about ‘the Nacho Man’, just as AEW is going to get nowhere putting THE REAL CM Punk on their television in footage that doesn't even harm him. Focus on making the roster you do have the next Rock, or Cody Rhodes, or CM Punk, or Roman Reigns. What a damning indictment for AEW that three of the main stars in WWE at the moment (Rhodes, Punk and Cargill) were all under their own roof. RAW alone just put 20,000 people in a building, peaked at 3 million viewers, and done another 2.4 million on YouTube. While AEW’s ratings are going down, the buildings are half empty unless it’s a PPV, and they’ve managed to get half of that crowd chanting for CM Punk. The fact the PPVs are still doing well (both in attendance and butyrate) tells me AEW are great at providing matches viewers want to pay to see, but have absolutely no clue how to build to them on their weekly TV.
Another thing that annoys me about AEW is this automatic belief that the viewer is supposed to know every Tom, Dick and Harry that comes in. Look, it's Mark Phoenix Jr., the biggest name in the history of GDPDF Wrestling! He had the feud of 2023 in CMLL and ROH with Luchador 16! And then someone you have been following on AEW TV - you know, the promotion you have been watching religiously every bloody week - will just inexplicably vanish. Queen Aminata, Red Velvet or Miro will be there one week and then you'll suddenly never see them again for 2 months. The way wrestlers like Will Hobbs or Wardlow are suddenly thrust into a feud with maybe 3 or 4 weeks of TV build and then disappear again off TV for weeks on end drives me nuts. If that happened all the time in a drama you'd eventually turn it off. 'Hey, you know that those past 6 episodes of The Last of Us that have been about Joel and Ellie? Well forget about that, it's now about Barry. You've never seen Barry, no one has ever referenced Barry, but he's the main character now. He'a a legend from Star Trek. What do you mean you haven't been following the last 40 episodes of Star Trek? Well strawberry float you pal, that's your fault. You were supposed to be following The Last of Us and Star Trek.'
Very bad night for AEW. Pretty much everyone seemed to agree beforehand that it was a bad idea. It came off worse than I was expecting. I thought it might get some CM Punk chants, but it seemed even worse with such a tiny crowd.
I think the stupidest bit for me was what Ospreay said about HHH. It came across as crass and misogynistic. Renee looked utterly embarrassed.
The three major takeaways from the show (All In, Ospreay and the main event) were basically just reactions to WWE. I love Dustin Rhodes, but what was achieved by putting on that main event after the absolute bangers Cody had over the weekend. It made them look so second rate.
They've gone so far from the original concept of sports based wresting. It's like CZW mixed with the odd NJPW match minus any storylines to set up matches. I dropped out from regularly watching after they started Collision. It felt like that was the beginning of them losing focus on what they did so well during year 1 and 2.
The fact TNA is still going even when their product was totally done, and is now just pottering along on a small network, I think shows that unless Tony Khan runs out of money or gets bored, AEW could happily carry on for decades. It would be like Tony Khan's secondary promotion Ring of Honor is now, basically.
If they get renewed by Discovery and end up on HBO Max or a similar streaming service later this year, they could rebound. Anything less than that and they'll just decline in terms of viewership and attendance at a faster rate than they are now. If AEW is content putting on a product in big buildings that have got to be around 50-70% empty that's up to them. At the end of the day, the Khan's are billionaires, AEW has no shareholders, they can do what they like. The only logical reason I can think they keep booking these big venues is from a production stand point (they want the big set, which is ironic because WWE now appear to be shrinking their sets down again as they want more people in the building); the atmosphere and look of TV would be far better in a smaller venue with those 2,000 or so fans. You'd rather have a few thousand people going crazy in a building like Blackpool's Empress Ball Room than in a 16,000 seater arena. That makes me feel like I'm watching something that's on its arse. It can't be much fun for the wrestlers either.
AEW's roster is far too big leading to disjointed and unfocused programming, and the addition of Collision (just as with Thunder) has done them no favours. I can't say I like the new Dynamite graphics and set design either (very NXT 2.0), but that could just be me. The white ring ropes, the overtly colourful graphics, the LEDs everywhere, having the same set design on 3 shows a week...it just feels very me-to and a poor-mans WWE (at a time WWE has now begun reverting to black and making their programming more adult and edgy again, but without some of the more excessive violence).
KK you absolutely nail it as always. AEW isn't at risk of dying. Even if they lose their TV deal, as long as TK keeps funding it, they will always be around. And even without a TV deal, I think they'd still be as big as they are now. AEW have a big advantage over WCW in that respect, as a Billionaire owner who is a hardcore fan is always going to be better than a TV mogul owner who could lose control of the network or lose interest. Ted Turner was a wrestling fan to a certain extent, but he wasn't as big a wrestling fan as TK and that needs to be respected.
I just really hope TK takes the Crockett and pre-WWF/WWE model and has an actual booking committee He has enough old school legends aligned with him or signed that he could do it. But fantasy booking is leading AEW to decline. If they stopped talking about WWE and built banging feuds to go with banging matches, they would grow again.
I just really worry TK is a 98-2000 WCW fan at heart and that's what he bases his booking on.
KK wrote:You can say AEW has the more talented roster, or the best technical wrestlers, or whatever you want to say, but like Shawn Michaels, Bret Hart, Mankind, The Rock, Steve Austin and so on in 1995, 1996, they’re not the stars yet. It was the nWo. It was Hogan. It was Randy Savage. It was Piper. WWF got absolutely nowhere telling the viewer about ‘the Nacho Man’, just as AEW is going to get nowhere putting THE REAL CM Punk on their television in footage that doesn't even harm him. Focus on making the roster you do have the next Rock, or Cody Rhodes, or CM Punk, or Roman Reigns. What a damning indictment for AEW that three of the main stars in WWE at the moment (Rhodes, Punk and Cargill) were all under their own roof. RAW alone just put 20,000 people in a building, peaked at 3 million viewers, and done another 2.4 million on YouTube. While AEW’s ratings are going down, the buildings are half empty unless it’s a PPV, and they’ve managed to get half of that crowd chanting for CM Punk. The fact the PPVs are still doing well (both in attendance and butyrate) tells me AEW are great at providing matches viewers want to pay to see, but have absolutely no clue how to build to them on their weekly TV.
This is my main issue with AEW right now, the matches from a wrestling and technical standpoint are great and I can't fault their PPVs for what they deliver in ring wise. Yet storyline wise Khan seems to have lost any idea in how to book them. Outside of Swerve going for the title, there's very little in way of storytelling and as you said KK the building up of matches using TV every week is practically non-existent. Compared to early on in AEW's life where there was compelling reasons to have most matches and they were well built, it seems to have vanished in the last year or so. Whereas on the flipside WWE, thanks to losing Vince, have had 2 years of long term, compelling storytelling for big feuds that paid off beautifully in the last two Wrestlemania's, which is one of the big reasons they're booming at the moment business wise. AEW don't have that and I don't think Tony Khan seems to know how to do it either at the moment.
Long rant, but this week’s episode was another prime example of ‘who the strawberry float is this?!’, as some woman runs down after Mariah May’s match and starts kissing her. Never been on AEW television as far as I can remember, no backstory until this sudden appearance, hardly anyone in the crowd probably knows who she is, no idea why she’s kissing Mariah May on the lips. Literally nothing has built to this moment on TV. Turns out per Excalibur, she’s a wrestler from Stardom and she had some sort of reunion with May over the weekend at their event; hell, maybe they’re longstanding tag team partners over there, I'm not sure. Then Schiavone cuts in ‘we saw them have a great match at Ring of Honor at the weekend’. He could have been talking about Mariah May, may have been talking about Mina Shirakawa (the woman that had just ran down). It wasn’t clear, because at the same time you’ve got the stuff with the champagne, Tazz is asking why this woman is actually pouring champagne down May’s throat in the first place, you’ve got this beat down that’s just happened from Anna Jay, before the match got underway you had Toni Storm assaulting Thunder Rosa as part of this ‘Charleston Championship Champagne toast’, where Deonna Purrazzo ran out for the save, but then Purrazzo had beef with Rosa over something…Tony Khan, I guess because he’s the most hardcore of wrestling fans, thinks we’re all watching 50 hours of pro wrestling every single week, and therefore we should know these people. Or that we should now go seek out their storyline to get ourselves up to speed about a woman that then might not even be on the TV I am watching the next week anyway, because she’ll be replaced with someone else that’s then debuting (i.e. a run-in) for the first time.
In the very next segment, Mercedes Moné - who you'd think would be the actual main event player here on this television show - was being interviewed backstage (the camera is zooming in and out like they’ve just employed Kevin Dunn), the lights then go out (what a stale trope that’s become) and she’s assaulted.
It’s like someone trying to write some semblance of a story and failing miserably at it, either because they can’t write a comprehensible long-term narrative or simply have such an enormous roster that everyone needs to be on TV on some sort of revolving door policy. This doesn't help in establishing who the top guys are and why, as a viewer, I should care about them. Serena Deeb was on TV again for a few weeks not that long ago, that was seemingly going somewhere, and now that’s kind of died a death. Maybe she’ll have a random 15 minute match somewhere again, maybe she’ll cut a promo somewhere…who knows…it’s all so staggeringly disjointed and unfocused. Nothing seems to segue properly from one AEW programme to the next, and it's highly frustrating. You've got 5 hours of TV every week, 6 this week, don't tell me about something that apparently went on many moons ago on the independents. The Devil storyline and The Kingdom is another one that pops into my head - that completely died the moment it was unveiled as Adam Cole. ‘Here’s another faction, no idea what to do with them’. The group now barely feature on TV. Going nowhere. Collision is a series of thrown together matches that take place simply because there's another 2 hours of TV time to fill. Matt Cardona turned up the other week for a match with Adam Copeland. Good match, nice surprise...but that was it.
Wasn’t Collision basically built around CM Punk? Show seems aimless after her left, they could probably do with cutting that show and just having Dynamite and Rampage. With RoH as well it’s all a bit much, they could take a leaf from WWE’s book and split the roster between Dynamite and Rampage and then use RoH as the NXT for AEW and build up the peeps who don’t get the time to show what they can do.
