The AEW Wednesday Night Dynamite Thread

[Fox Piss]

JR seems to have a real gripe with some stuff on the show. I'm not saying he is wrong either but all that needs discussing backstage and not in my ear. I always thought JR would be a great number 2 to Tony Khan as a buffer/man to hate to stop all the VP's wild shite. 

[Love-Wilcox]

Britt Baker may be shit but at least we got to see a babyface win a match in their home town for once.

[TheBurningRed]

I hope Britt isn’t wrestling again next week. Surely it’s time for Nyla to come back and do something. 

They/Cody have announced fans attending next week will receive Rick and Morty masks. So that’s... great. I hope NXT strike back. But in an out of touch way and it’s Family Guy masks for everyone.  

[AndyUK]

It was solid but yeah, definitely too many TV matches with nothing in between. The Jericho/Cody angle was great and hopefully we see more stuff like that with other members of the roster. 

[Supremo]

Easily the worst show on TNT so far.

Once again, just too much wrestling and not enough character work. They've gotten better, and that angle with Cody and Jericho was brilliant, but the balance is still miles off. Relentless workrate might be what your dickhead fans claim that they want but you need to be smart enough to know they're full of shit. I mean, fucking hell, Jon Moxley hasn't uttered a single word on this show yet! Eight hours of TV! Four hundred and eighty minutes! Not a peep. He's probably the best promo in the company, if not the entire country, arguably the entire business, and you've somehow managed to keep him mute! If this time limit draw doesn't result in him kicking off next week's show with an anger-filled promo then I'll lose my faith entirely.

Speaking of which, whilst I like the idea of time limits, and the occasional time limit draw is definitely needed to establish them, that main event finish felt no better than just doing a shitty DQ or count-out. It's just as anticlimactic. They think they're being pure sports~! about it, but you only had to look at Kenny Omega's sad face at the very end of the FITE feed, where there were small, "bullshit," chants, to see he realised they'd dropped a bollock. It's super wanky to think your non-finish is more satisfactory just because it's a time limit~! rather than a double DQ or whatever. Do they really think this was better than Omega coming out for the DQ and having a huge arena-wide brawl with Moxley to go off the air? Put your newsletters down and get a grip.

Britt Baker absolutely sucks. Frozen, silent statue on commentary, sloppy, unimpressive amateur in the ring, shit, overbearing dentist gimmick that they never, ever shut up about, and then even in her big home town appearance she gets completely overshadowed by Jamie Hayter, who looked to have far more potential than almost every woman they've featured so far.

Honestly, it's time to admit what most clocked over the Summer; that the Bucks and Omega haven't got a clue when it comes to the big picture. Great on-screen talents, sure, but in terms of booking themselves and their respective divisions? Wanky smart fans from 2003. It's time Cody gets to book the whole show rather than just his segments. The difference in quality is staggering. In fact, now I've thought about it, who the fuck decided they should end the show on a wonky, stupid draw rather than DDP and Dustin marching down the aisle like bosses, Cody smashing through a window and Jericho hamming it up in the foyer with a ticket stuck to his forehead? Someone genuinely thought Moxley sulking would be a better cliffhanger?! Madness.

The saddest part of all though? Jim Ross being such a bad influence on Tony Schiavone! I don't know why, but for whatever reason you could hear all of Jim's worst habits rubbing off on Tony this week. Instead of being the slick, super professional keeping the desk together, Tony was joining in with JR's snarky, sarcastic shit, making fun of the names of moves and endlessly banging on about people not holding shoulders down on pin attempts. If they had any sense it'd be a two man team next week, with just Schiavone and Excalibur. It's clear listening to this show that Ross only exists to drag Tony down.

On a more positive note, Sammy Guevara continues to shine in even the smallest roles. Dancing like a tit to the luxury box, spraying the bubbly on the crowd, he's an unbelievably good prick and the rub Jericho has given him already has been fantastic. I really want them to book Dustin vs. Guevara at Full Gear. That's the perfect combination of heel and babyface.

Edited October 25, 2019 by Supremo

[DavidB6937]

This week was okay although I was disappointed with PP/Lucha Bros, something that looked good on paper but never reached the levels I thought it could. PP just seemed a little off and not really on the level of Lucha Bros. Obviously they're not yet but it certainly highlighted that. Didn't help that I didn't really care about the other tag match either, so I found that difficult to get into.

The sooner they sort their womens division out and actually focus on some of their good female talent the better. Please. It's not even like they don't have decent ones on the roster. Their focus seems to be on the shit ones.

Enjoyed all the Jericho stuff. That was fun.

Yeah, not a fan of that ending. Time limit draws have a time and a place and I just don't think they work at the end of a show.

[tiger_rick]

9 hours ago, WyattSheepMask said:

While I’m sure people will be making a big thing of AEW Having the higher ratings for a forth straight week, one thing that doesn’t seem to get talked about is that both shows are losing viewers week on week. That could be down to the NBA or other sports at this time of year, but when it’s not NBA or NFL season, it’ll be interesting to see what sort of numbers both shows are getting

It is interesting. Both have lost near on half a million viewers since their debut shows. AEW's last couple of weeks have only been slight drop offs but it's still dropping, while NXT is similar.

The initial big drops are easy to explain. There's a lot of curiosity for the big launches, a lot of people ensuring they are in to watch when they wouldn't mornally be, etc. Happens with most shows. The steady drop since isn't massively alarming yet but if it continues should give them hints that either the shows or what they're promoting ahead of time isn't juicy enough to entice people.

Obviously the big caveat is just how reliable that number is these days. It's still important to sponsors but is it adjusted for DVR, etc? Similarly with NXT, you've got to add in Network viewers, domestically, to get a true picture. Gates and PPV buys/Takeover views will give them a better idea of how they are doing economically. Nearly a million people have viewed the episodes of AEW Dark on YouTube. 1.4m people have watched Finn Balor kick Gargano in the head on YouTube. That's another ridiculously difficult measure because those people could be anywhere in the world but they could also be people who'll follow NXT on YouTube and Twitter and watch a Takeover or a PPV.

These days it's as much about followers and interactions as anything else. It's like the Fox deal. They must be gutted with the Smackdown audience. But WWE promote their brand 50 times a week to 50million+ people on social media. That's insanely important to them too.

[BomberPat]

Case study of one, but I've completely fallen out of the habit of watching NXT already because I don't even know when it's on the Network any more. I used to stick it on when I got home from work on a Thursday, but it's not on the Network at that time any more, so by the weekend I tend to forget. Whereas AEW is still fresh enough that I'll go out of my way to watch it - even if ITV's schedule is even more confusing!

TV companies must take all of this stuff into account, though, and measure up different metrics accordingly - though the appeal of live wrestling should be that it's "event TV", and can't miss in the way that a big live sports game is. That's surely where the appeal for sponsors comes from.

 

In terms of audience drop off - I have a theory that one of the problems with modern wrestling audiences is that they convinced themselves that a very narrow window, say 1996 - 1999, is how wrestling is supposed to work, and that everything else is doing it wrong. Not just in terms of how shows are booked and presented, but in how promotions relate to one another; everything has to be a reframing of WWF vs. WCW, any other promotion has to be "at war" with WWE. Impact pursued it, fans tried to will it into existence with NJPW as a rival to WWE, and it's how the entire dynamic of AEW is framed.

So with this being presented as effectively a do-over of the Monday Night Wars, and with a preposterous level of hype going into it, I do wonder how much people are tuning out because they're not getting the big surprises and ex-WWE talent debuts and so on that they maybe convinced themselves they were in for. A lot of people seem more prepared to speculate about someone like Randy Orton jumping ship to AEW than to invest in the talent already there - and AEW aren't blameless in that, as we've discussed their failure to establish characters already. 
I like that they're taking it slow, but I assume there's an awful lot of fans expecting something big from every AEW episode, and not getting it.

[Carbomb]

17 hours ago, King Pitcos said:

Vince hating wrestling is just part of the stupid internet hatred of him, from when he’d push Triple H and Cena over whichever Blandy McWorkrate was flavour of the month - “if Vince really liked wrestling, Cesaro would be the champion and Shelton would main event WrestleMania against him in an iron man match! But WWE is sports entertainment, not pro wrestling for real wrestling fans! I’m never calling him dad, mom! I’m going to my room!”

Where’s the evidence for Vince disliking wrestling? His failed attempts to crack other avenues of entertainment? Potentially there’s the fact that his most prosperous times (before Saudi and TV money changed the game) were when his product was based more around characters and skits than wrestling matches. But that was when the people who say he hates wrestling most enjoyed his product anyway.

He rips up his creative team’s scripts at the last minute and replaces them with wrestling matches that have no narrative purpose. Why would he do that if he hated wrestling? At this stage, it seems like not only does he like wrestling, he likes the same wrestling that Bryan Alvarez likes.

I can't speak for the IWC, but that's not where I got the notion from, personally, nor is it from the stuff the IWC stereotypically criticises him for, i.e. workrate guys, push the cruisers, etc. And I did say I accepted it could be an unfair impression, and I also said I thought he disliked wrestling, not hated it.

The reason I get that impression is because of how he seems to do things now that appear to be self-defeating, defying his own rules of storytelling or presentation. We've seen so many pushes or storylines get cancelled illogically, before there's been any chance to know if it would've worked or not, because of a whim, or things badly booked because of ego or just a rib. Major case in point is the Invasion. I'm not saying I could've booked it better, but you don't need to be good at something to know when something's done badly, and the fact that fans didn't enjoy it in general says it all; it surely could've been booked better than it was, even without the big names that were missing. All it did was come across as a McMahon wankfest.

Another one was Zach Ryder and the whole New Jersey thing. Not because Ryder's any good, but because if somebody that mediocre suddenly gets virtually main-event levels of popularity out of the blue to everyone's surprise, why wouldn't you capitalise on that for as long as you could? It's money for almost nothing. 

And it's all very well saying the fans are entitled, but if they're actually cheering or popping for someone unexpectedly, that means they got over, and, back when he still seemed to have some joy regarding wrestling, he would take that and run with it; now he seems determined to tell fans "You're not my real kids! I planned to send you to military school, so you'll go to military school!"

And yes - a big part of the impression I get for him disliking wrestling is his frequent attempts to do other things. I often wonder what would happen to WWE if one of his many ventures actually succeeded.

To clarify: I don't think he always felt that way about wrestling. Hell, he probably doesn't feel that way now. It may be he's just jaded, and this is the result of decades making his living this way. When you're the top dog in the business, you've beaten everyone, have revolutionised the industry beyond anything it ever was before, and continue to make millions of dollars no matter how good or bad your product is, it must be difficult to stay hungry. There's no further career progression or development, and he's not the sort of person who's going to just retire to spend all his time with his grandkids and pottering about the house, so maybe he just wants something new to do, and is just cruising now. 

Edited October 25, 2019 by Carbomb

[King Pitcos]

C’mon, Carbomb. How have you bolded the word “now” and then your examples are the invasion from almost twenty years ago, and Zack Ryder from almost ten years ago!

In terms of more recent stuff, you seem to be equating Vince trolling his entitled stepchild audience with him disliking wrestling. I don’t follow the logic there, could you please elaborate?

[Pinc]

It never occurred to me that the Vince-as-stepdad analogy works both ways, but its a good shout.

Update your examples though for sure.

[BomberPat]

It's a boring answer but, ultimately, we don't know what goes into the decisions made in booking.

Sometimes there's a wrestler who your audience really respond to, and looking from the outside, it would seem like common sense to get behind them as a major babyface. But from within the company, maybe you know he's got a reputation for forgetting spots and being unreliable to work with, or he has some skeletons in his closet, or some other reason you don't want to take the risk. Maybe he's just a dick. The Invasion is this on an insane scale - do you assume that "WWF vs. WCW" is enough of a draw in its own right that it almost doesn't matter who the talent on either side are (which the buyrates for the initial Invasion PPV arguably support), do you risk making the extremely damaged WCW brand look superior to the WWF, or do you fork out millions to buy out the Turner contracts? People will always say, "Vince could have afforded it", and that he should have put up the money to bring in Goldberg, Sting et al in 2001. But then what happens to the likes of The Undertaker, Kane, Kurt Angle, Chris Jericho and so on, to say nothing of midcarders wanting to break through to that upper echelon, suddenly earning less than a crew who just walked through the door and started earning that huge money from day one? You're risking a locker room mutiny. 

With Zack Ryder, someone summed it up as, "he did really well, considering he's Zack Ryder". There's a difference between being popular and being a viable star - Ryder was getting cheered, but was it translating into anything? Were the ratings higher when he was featured, was he shifting merchandise in any great numbers? Even aside from all that, on a purely character-based note, Ryder's popularity was based on a YouTube show in which he presented himself as a schmuck - so you can't really complain that he was booked as a schmuck as a result.

I don't think Vince has ever really run with someone getting organically over unless his hand was forced. People point to Steve Austin, but that was a long and grueling process to establish himself as more than a midcard hand, and more or less after Vince had exhausted all other options, and had his back to the wall. If anything, the key talent Vince has really lost over the past ten years is the ability to dictate to the audience and convince them of what they want - a good promoter doesn't necessarily give the audience everything they want (because the audience don't always really know what they want), a good promoter convinces the audience that what they're being given is what they always wanted.

 

The main criticism now is how often the WWE breaks its own internal logic, abandons angles halfway through, and just drops thing. But really 'twas ever thus - the Attitude Era was rife with stories cut short, stipulations ignored, and logic thrown out of the window. I'd still say it's worse now, but perhaps only because we're not getting enough quality stuff to balance it out.

The received wisdom seems to be that WWE suffer because they have to answer solely to the whims of a mad pensioner, and maybe there's some truth to that. But surely right now Vince has less absolute control than he's ever had? Maybe the issue isn't that Vince is the be-all and end-all, but that Vince - unlike in years past - now has to answer to a wider range of outside stakeholders. FOX are demanding this while the USA Network demands that, sponsors aren't happy with X, while shareholders want more of Y, but the fans wish they'd do Z, and all the while the Saudi Royal Family still want Q from twenty years ago. Can you imagine the Vince McMahon of 1998 introducing a new title belt because the TV network asked for one?

[tiger_rick]

Vince clearly had a passion for wrestling. He grew up around it. He thought it could be better than the industry he saw though. He wanted to modernise it, make it bolder, brighter, more mainstream and more socially acceptable. There's no wonder when you look at the state of things in the early 80s. I'm sure he loved getting dragged in to defend his bunch of carnies from killing women, shagging children, shitting in bathtubs and the rest.

Having attempted to do that, it's little wonder he likes his terms like "superstar" and "sports entertainment" because he has always seen a clear divide between the WWF he created and the "smoke filled halls" previously, however much of a myth some of that is. Again, that doesn't equate to Vince hates wrestling.

My biggest problem with Vince is the hypocrisy. He wanted to move away from the sleaziness and dirtiness of pro-rasslin but he was still happy to see guys inflate themselves artificially and dangerously, slice themselves open, roll around on filthy, bloody canvas, treat women like shit, etc, etc. And he was happy to try and cover it up and avoid difficult questions because he's above it all.

In fairness to them, as sanitised as the on-screen product has become, it does appear that they've tried to sanitise the backstage environment too. It seems like they now somewhat practice what they preach.

On-screen is different. That's clearly hampered by Vince's attempts to share the load as the company outgrew 2 men and a dog booking on a fag packet and possibly to ensure a succession plan that doesn't rely on one man/family. As big as those teams get though, they've still always got one person overly involved in everything and they all write and produce safely because it appears, rightly or wrongly, to be an environment of fear. I don't know what the solution is there. It's a massive undertaking to take producing five hours of live TV anyway. To try and slim down the number of people who have an input into that and create an environment where they can try different things and yet get more people involved who know wrestling is difficult. I just don't see it.

Edited October 25, 2019 by tiger_rick

[Carbomb]

5 minutes ago, King Pitcos said:

C’mon, Carbomb. How have you bolded the word “now” and then your examples are the invasion from almost twenty years ago, and Zack Ryder from almost ten years ago!

In terms of more recent stuff, you seem to be equating Vince trolling his entitled stepchild audience with him disliking wrestling. I don’t follow the logic there, could you please elaborate?

Sorry - I mean "now" as opposed to the period you were originally referring to, i.e. the age that we grew up with that, as you say, we were OK with. I'm still one of those old gits for whom 2001 is still only ten years ago until I really think about it and make myself depressed. 

As to the trolling, it's a difficult one, because I get the feeling of a kind of intangible hostility to it that I can't quite put my finger on. The sense that, because the fans are essentially paying his wages, and he seeks to frustrate the ones that don't go along with his plans. It's difficult for me to provide really recent examples, as I've not watched in years and have only been going off reports. But the one that comes to mind is the Daniel Bryan thing. If people were legitimately cheering for him, and really wanted to see him win the Rumble, why not just have that happen? McMahon ended up salting the ground for the next year because of that one moment. Sure, the fans might be entitled - but he's the one who entitled them. He's accustomised them to a way of working that he himself laid down with years of his style of booking and narrative structuring. He was the one who told them, effectively "If you like someone enough, they will be the main event, and continue to be so", and lo and behold: he was angry when they wanted someone in the main event that didn't fit the plan. I know Bryan was given a lot prior to that, so I agree the fans were indeed being a bit entitled too, but hey - Cena, Batista, Edge, Lesnar, etc., were given just as much, if not more, even after their popularities waned, so maybe they felt he should be on that level.

Thing about that is, in previous eras, if he was high on someone, he'd push them, but if it turned out to be a bust, he'd adapt - cases in point: Lex Luger, Ludvig Borga, Billy Gunn. I have to rack my brains to really come up with those names. But recent years have seen guys pushed to the main event even after they clearly weren't over, and the names are more numerous. He's got a plan, and he won't let something as trivial as the fans get in the way.

Like I say, perhaps it's more a jadedness than a dislike. Back in the 80s and 90s, when he was in full swing, fighting with the territories and NWA/wCw for every inch of ground he could take, every niche in the market he could occupy, he was probably enjoying the combativeness of it all, probably feeling more "alive", I guess. But for the past 18 years, there's been no challenge to him, really.

Y'know how it's often discussed how he has no respect for people who don't challenge him? It's a massive guess on my part, but I can't help but wonder if he feels the same about his audience - that, since WcW went under, he's been the only game in town, and that he no longer respects the audience for continuing to watch even when even he knows the product is bad, and he'd make more effort in trying to impress them if they showed enough discernment and criticism that he could respect by leaving in droves. I say again, though, it's a massive guess.

Looking back on my points as I write them, perhaps it's more that he gives the impression he dislikes wrestling fans, casual, smark, mainstream, et al., rather than the business itself. And I still accept that my impression could be wrong - it's just how it comes across.

[Little Johnny]

6 minutes ago, Carbomb said:

since WcW went under, he's been the only game in town

Since who went under?