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The 2022 strip out Triple H's vision thread


garynysmon

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1 hour ago, Cannibal Man said:

someone's clearly forged the accounts to stop them remembering NXT UK is still a going concern

Im starting to think there isn't any paperwork. Perhaps Vince found a letter from HMRC and that's why he's pissed at Hunter. I'd love to watch him standing behind Bruce on a laptop trying to complete those tax return forms. 

Edited by simonworden
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58 minutes ago, Winston said:

I've no doubts that if Triple H was sitting in Vince's chair right now that the WWE product would be far more watchable and enjoyable.

I despair at the direction they are heading in just now. It's an absolute car crash.

I’ve lost touch a bit and not regularly watched the product for about three years. I know they didn’t fair as well opposite Elite as they wanted for which Vince has pulled it’s guts out, pissed colour all over it and changed it completely, while Hunters on his deathbed. But from a fans perspective, and an enjoyment perspective rather than “what ratings were like up against AEW”, can someone fill me in as to when/how NXT went from being a brilliant show which I watched for years, which we all thanked Hunter for, to being a show derided as “gone to the dogs” even before the reboot, which people seem to blame Hunter for? I’ve lost a few steps.

Maybe it’s like Sid where the prevailing opinion has to be the right one even though inside we all know our hearts say differently. Everyone’s got to stop loving Hunter for keeping us interested in big production wrestling as long as he did, and it must be his fault it went shit because he buried one of our favourites in 2002, 2003 or 2004.

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Given HHH reputation before he got the internet sucking him off, he’s probably given the list to Khan on who to sack and letting him take the heat for his hiring mistakes 

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2 hours ago, Winston said:

I've no doubts that if Triple H was sitting in Vince's chair right now that the WWE product would be far more watchable and enjoyable.

I despair at the direction they are heading in just now. It's an absolute car crash.

HHH and Nick Khan trying to sit in Vince's chair

 

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1 hour ago, air_raid said:

can someone fill me in as to when/how NXT went from being a brilliant show which I watched for years, which we all thanked Hunter for, to being a show derided as “gone to the dogs” even before the reboot, which people seem to blame Hunter for? I’ve lost a few steps.

 

I honestly think it was the pandemic, before that they were keeping up with AEW quality wise, NXT was an interesting enough show but when they had to move to the PC weekly, AEW left them behind. Think how dire Raw/Sd was for a good 12 months and imagine having less talent/money over on NXT.

The hot crowds were always a big part of the attraction of nxt, they provided the passion to fuel the shows.

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I was never crazy into NXT but the slide for me seemed to come when they just ran out of proper marquee indie/international stars to debut twice a year. Whenever I took a glance at it, it became all about the Undisputed Era - who done nothing for me - and the novelty of the whole ascendancy path to Raw/Smackdown lost all its appeal since the talent figured out they'd be fucked over and have a worse quality of life on those brands. 

The carefully curated vibe got old, as well. Full Sail was basically WWE's create-a-show in one of the video games. The lighting, camera cuts, where you should look and when, everyone having their little bullet point slogan/quirk/space in the theme song for crowd participation started to feel very conveyor belt and the product lost all spontaneity. 

I don't want to shit on it too much, though, because like I was saying earlier those first few years of the Network seem like rays of light now. A lot of good stuff was happening. A bit of a mini nice-guy-WWE era. This was around the time Smackdown had that great first few month of the brand split, WrestleMania 30 + 31 were some of the best ever, AJ Styles having his amazing first year etc. 

Edited by Gay as FOOK
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2 minutes ago, garynysmon said:

The fact they get about ÂŁ100 a week and a fish supper probably saves their bacon.

They’ll probably replace the fish supper with bacon as a cost cutting measure shortly.

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It'll be interesting to see, historically, what gets seen as the final tipping point for NXT. It got popular because it was just a logically booked hour of wrestling TV with fun characters and coherent stories, and then got the additional "workrate" boost of bringing in indie stars of the type that previously you never thought you'd see in WWE.

But even well before AEW or the pandemic, it had lost a lot of that charm the more it became a dedicated Third Brand. You weren't seeing interesting homegrown talent mixing it up as much with the indie names as you used to, the novelty of big name indie signings wore off as "new signing appears in the crowd" became a cliché and they were trying to sell the likes of Eli Drake as being as exciting as Kevin Owens or Samoa Joe showing up had been. It didn't help that the majority of the bigger indie names were just brought in with existing characters and names in order to try and get some immediate "indie cred" off them, rather than allowing for the sort of character reinvention that Sami Zayn underwent. 

By the time it was full-fledged Third Brand and Not Developmental, they lost their biggest selling point - logical, coherent stories with a satisfying conclusion. When you had guys like Sami Zayn and Kevin Owens feuding there, the story wouldn't outstay its welcome because one or both of them would get called up to the main roster at the end, and they could move on to the next thing, so it always felt fresh. But when it became clear that Johnny Gargano et al were never getting called up, the great start to the DIY break-up and feud got forgotten because it just dragged on and on and on with no end in sight. By the time I gave up watching NXT, it was because The Undisputed Era seemed to be in every single segment whenever I put it on, and hadn't grown or changed as characters at all in the entire time they were. Sami Zayn was once seen as the "face of NXT", and his run there lasted three years, during which time his character grew and evolved - The Undisputed Era were there for four years and the closest thing they did to changing was adding Roderick Strong. Even when they broke up, Cole was feuding with O'Reilly so they were still all over the show.

I mostly gave up when they went live - the shows got clunkier, and not being on the Network the next day meant I fell out of the routine of watching it. But whenever I checked in, it was kneejerk booking of big matches to try and compete with AEW, rather than the slow build and logical stories that got them where they should be. Ironically, NXT 2.0 is in many ways closer to NXT under Dusty Rhodes when it first started getting a following than it was toward the end of Triple H's run, but you can't just put the genie back in the bottle like that.

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