AEW TV 2025 Discussion

[RedTwoster]

8 hours ago, Infinity Land said:

The sales pitch for the National title sounds good. Heard it all before with the All-Atlantic.

I think, with any new title, they need to ask themselves ‘how does this make AEW television better’ and I think that’s a hard one to answer. PAC defending the All-Atlantic belt in outside companies meant nothing and did not impact storylines in any way. Even if someone from an outside company won it, it can only really be a novelty the first time it happens, and given that people from other companies frequently appear in AEW, it’s hard to imagine it would feel significant. 

I think AEW has been at its best when there have been less titles being defended as it’s forced them to tell stories that don’t revolve around belts and for the most part, particularly this year, they’ve been very good. 

If they’re to introduce a new title, I’d rather not be unique - a Super Heavyweight title for example (or something to that effect) to allow for some fun, athletic big man matches or mixed gender tag title belts, which would allow for interactions we’ve never seen before even beyond the matches - imagine a promo segment involving both Hangman Page and Toni Storm, for example. 

But this? It’s nothing new and it’s hard to see any upside to it

[HarmonicGenerator]

Lots of the weird bits of this week’s Dynamite - the new title, the continuing oddness of Eddie Kingston’s booking, Full Gear being rematchamania, the uninspiring Blood and Guts buildup - have already been covered brilliantly by others above.

My main thing I’d want to add is how gutting it is that Queen Aminata is no longer in the women’s Blood & Guts, after months of being one of the main driving forces towards it with her blood feud against Thekla. I hope they give them the chance to have a crazy PPV match of their own once she’s back.

[Supremo]

At this point, I just find it amusing how much Tony Khan’s billionaire upbringing shines through in his booking. Less is more? Not for Richie Rich! More is more! Every time! Then. Now. Forever. And ever.

People struggling with the Four and a half hour pay per views? Make All In 2025 six hours long! Unified some belts? Introduce more! Two wildly violent War Games matches on a single episode of TV? Probably needs a fucking Falls Count Anywhere Match as garnish.

Edited November 6, 2025 by Supremo

[LaGoosh]

I'm guessing it's falls count anywhere so they can fight in the crowd/backstage while they clean up the ring/cages inbetween the two Blood & Guts matches.

[Supremo]

I hadn’t even considered that!

Hopefully they stumble into the bar.

[LaGoosh]

I very much enjoyed that Dynamite but I will say that Tony Khan is incredibly lucky to have such a talented roster to cover for his shitty booking.

- Opening segment was good though badly paced. Feel like pacing in these angles is quite often bad. Don't AEW do rehearsals to iron this stuff out? If not, they need to! So often you feel like everyone is waiting around for the next thing to happen.

- I love The Opps and they are perfectly good heels although at the same time who wants to boo a group of extremely cool and handsome ass kickers?

- I feel for Hangman a bit. His reign has been hit by the injury bug. If Ospreay, Swerve and Omega were all healthy you just know they would all be in the title picture and the AEW main event scene would be on fire. Alas! This Joe feud is fine but Hangman feels in a holding pattern with unconvincing challengers. Hopefully Swerve is back soon and they can get straight to it. In the meantime I think they need to be building up Okada as the next challenger. I could even see them putting the title on him...I wouldn't be against it, either!

- OC vs Claudio was predictably excellent. It's a pity Claudio never figured out how to do promos because his current evil violent fascist persona could get him to the main event scene. There was a counter in this where OC had Claudio in a sleeper for absolutely ages and Claudio reached round, snapped OC's fingers then swung him round in mid air directly into a big swing that damn near made me jump out my chair. Where the best wrestle, indeed!

- the Babes of Wrath vs Mercedes/Athena was another excellent match. This womens tournament is so hastily thrown together because if booked right with time and space this match could have felt like a huge deal. I would have had it on PPV as the tournament final! Just highlights how messy the booking is right now. Booking a women's tag tournament, Blood and Guts and promoting PPV matches all at the same time is just too much going on and has diminished all of it. I want all those things but Tony just give them to me one at a time. This is like eating breakfast, lunch and dinner all at once.

- Garcia/Allin was fantastic! Both men really sell something that is overlooked in most wrestling these days - the struggle. They scratch and claw for every moment of the match. There's no holes in their work. Both men are really great at filling the gaps between the big moments with relentless violence and selling and it's why they were gretting real, genuine reactions from the crowd rather than "THIS IS AWESOME" shite. Both were laying it in like they wanted to kill each other. I could watch ten matches between these two.

- a new title...I mean I'm too exhausted and uninterested by the titles in AEW right now that I don't even care. The Continental title should never have been defended as a real title, it should just be the winning prize for the Continental Classic. And Orange Cassidy put in too much work getting the International title to mean something for it to just be consumed by the pointless Unified Championship. Good mic work by Ricochet. His squeaky annoying voice is just perfect for a heel.

- a prime example of something good in theory but not following through properly or laid out in a satisfying way: Briscoe vs Fletcher. Now these two have unreal chemistry together. But the way this story should have been told is Mark Briscoe being obsessed with winning that TNT tile, every time he gets a little bit closer but it's snatched away. Eventually it gets to a point where he has to lay it all on the line and put himself up as a gambling chip to get what he wants and agree to join the DCF if he loses. Because he has no other choice and he MUST beat Fletcher for that title. But instead they just kind of casually threw it out there in one segment. No real story beats of Briscoe's desperation, hesitation or any real identifiable emotional reaction at all. At the same time Briscoe has a Blood & Guts match a week away which he should surely be preparing for as a priority??? Again Tony is giving me something I want but in the least exciting way possible.

- Mina vs Bayne was a decent little TV match. They have good chemistry and I would like to see them run this one again. Toni Storm was very frustrating on commentary. Yes, she was hilarious and yes, promoting a lesbian couple on wrestling TV is fantastic. But she was entirely focused on making jokes (yes, they were very funny) rather than promoting the Blood & Guts match or the tag title tournament. Ending stuff was all fine, I'm excited for the Women's Blood & Guts match though regardless of the shitty backwards booking.

- the Jurassic Express isn't hugely working for me. The original fun of the gimmick was that Jungleboy was a fresh faced squeaky clean pretty young babyface. But he's gone through so much bullshit now I don't really feel like his current persona is clear. Before the All In incident he was doing decent work as an annoying little shit bag heel. Now he's this weird almost blank slate. 

- Main event was loads of fun, really loved it. Weirdly the match felt entirely designed to get Powerhouse Hobbs over rather than anyone else in the match or the upcoming Hangman/Joe rematch. Again, a great watch but the wacky booking is a complete head scratcher.

- I like that they are currently doing one whacky moment per week. Mercedes putting a puppet into a cake. Hangman as Master of Disguise. And this week Brody punching through a wall to grab a screaming Stokely. As long as they keep it to one thing a week I'm very happy.

So overall, another good episode of Dynamite which could easily have been great if you had someone run a fine tooth comb through it and make it consistently logical and figure out how to properly pace and promote the right things at the right time. This promotion is fucking bonkers.

Edited November 7, 2025 by LaGoosh

[BomberPat]

1 hour ago, LaGoosh said:

- I feel for Hangman a bit. His reign has been hit by the injury bug. If Ospreay, Swerve and Omega were all healthy you just know they would all be in the title picture and the AEW main event scene would be on fire. Alas! This Joe feud is fine but Hangman feels in a holding pattern with unconvincing challengers. Hopefully Swerve is back soon and they can get straight to it. In the meantime I think they need to be building up Okada as the next challenger. I could even see them putting the title on him...I wouldn't be against it, either!

And here's something that didn't even occur to me until you brought up Okada - where the hell was he? There was no Okada or Takeshita on this show at all. It feels a bit Bizarro World to be complaining that we're not getting enough Don Callis Family, but was the backstage segment with Briscoe and Fletcher the only time we saw any of them all night? I know there's a lot to fit in, and I assume Takeshita is still in Japan given he's been working NJPW and DDT, but the Takeshita slow burn face turn is one of the best things happening right now, they shouldn't be going a whole show without even referencing it. Even just a video package of Takeshita defending the IWGP belt in Japan would be something.

On top of that, speaking of the Callis Family, El Clon hasn't even had a match yet.

The pacing in these segments being off makes me think a lot is being booked and hastily rebooked on the fly - there was a show a few weeks back where Excalibur got some stick online for fucking up his read of the card, because what he was saying hadn't matched the graphics appearing on-screen or something, and that tells me that it wasn't Excalibur at fault, but that the show format was changed and he wasn't updated. That's a show getting juggled around all over the place, and it reminds me of the worst periods of AEW TV, where they would put up a match graphic for something before the angle to set up that match had aired.

I think a lot has been fucked up booking-wise lately, and not just the absences at the top of the card. I don't think the Death Riders were ever supposed to be in Blood & Guts. My feeling is that Blood & Guts was originally going to be a reunited Elite vs. Don Callis Family - they'd been doing some weird stuff with the Young Bucks being reluctant to superkick Kenny Omega after the Jurassic Express match, and never fully committing to the Bucks joining up with Don Callis, while the Callis Family were taking out Kenny Omega. I think Kota Ibushi's injury and Kenny not being physically where he wants to be to carry bigger matches (and possibly the mess with Andrade's contract) forced them to change things up. Instead, they've had to drag the Darby/Death Riders feud past its logical endpoint, crowbar the Conglomeration into the feud, and find something else for Kenny and the Bucks to do. Maybe even Hangman's feud with Joe wouldn't have happened otherwise.

[Chili]

I just think there are so many more exciting things that could be happening in this promotion beyond a great slow burn for Takeshita. Something AEW do well is let you fill in the gaps in some stories, but that was always because they were gaps you could logically understand because of how it was told. Hangman's big first arc being a great example. Sometimes they don't, and I find it extremely frustrating because it's also not really emphasised elsewhere. It absolutely shouldn't be WWE style shouting it all in your face and insulting the viewers intelligence, but I dunno, something a bit more consistent. 

It makes me think of the weirdness going on with Eddie Kingston. Because it's AEW, this weird return might actually be a subtle slow burn to something. But if it is, it's not going to be a satisfying reveal to me because nothing has really been made clear. I still can't believe this is how Eddie bloody Kingston has been brought back to TV. Same to a degree with Orange Cassidy. I'm not saying their returns should have been like when Austin returned in 2000 levels, but their returns should have been big seismic shake-ups for the stories and the card. If Eddie has been slowly brought back to break him back in, IMO it's stupid because your just burning away the excitement and interest his return should have garnered. It's absolutely mad that I'm not interested in what he's doing at the moment. I'm not even bothering, and yet all they needed to do was him just to storm out, cut a heartfelt rambling Eddie monologue and call someone out and I'd have been game from the off. I'm genuinely a bit iffy about whether he's at odds and on his way out of the company or something. Which if so would be fucking shite! I don't want him do Kawada tributes in Saudi Arabia.

[LaGoosh]

When he was off injured Eddie had grown out his head and beard long and he looked like a deranged, mental hobo - it was a great look. They should have brought him back in like that - a man driven insane by his time away from the ring, unable to release his violent side, on the verge of a complete breakdown at having been forced to watch his biggest enemy (Claudio) and best friend (Mox) join forces to try and destroy the company. 

But instead he turned up clean cut to face Big Bill and team with Hook.

Edited November 7, 2025 by LaGoosh

[HarmonicGenerator]

32 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

And here's something that didn't even occur to me until you brought up Okada - where the hell was he? There was no Okada or Takeshita on this show at all. It feels a bit Bizarro World to be complaining that we're not getting enough Don Callis Family, but was the backstage segment with Briscoe and Fletcher the only time we saw any of them all night? I know there's a lot to fit in, and I assume Takeshita is still in Japan given he's been working NJPW and DDT, but the Takeshita slow burn face turn is one of the best things happening right now, they shouldn't be going a whole show without even referencing it. Even just a video package of Takeshita defending the IWGP belt in Japan would be something.

There was a backstage segment with the DCF and the Young Bucks, where the Bucks were trying to avoid committing to joining the Family. Okada showed up and put a bit of "hurry up lads" pressure on them. No Takeshita, or mention of Takeshita, though.

[BomberPat]

ah, I had completely forgotten about that bit ,and don't even remember Okada being involved at all!

The other thing that struck me about Eddie Kingston on this show is that he came out wielding a crutch, which was never really addressed. It does make me worry that his knee maybe is in worse shape than he was letting on, and he genuinely had been using the crutch backstage, and him not being 100% is why they're not risking him on anything more involved - but that doesn't explain the lack of promo time.

[LaGoosh]

On 11/2/2025 at 8:20 PM, The King Of Swing said:

Immediately jobbing your newest Woman's tag team (that only last week was teasing a feud with another team) out to a thrown together tag team was absolutely baffling booking

Seems like they agreed with you! Dixon and the other one pulled a "that doesn't work for me brother" and walked out of Collision an hour before the show because they didn't want to do the favours for TayJay.

Pretty fucking stupid on their part to burn the AEW bridge so quickly. It's not like they have any drawing power to bargain with. Also the AEW booking for new people is pretty standard: you do a load of jobs but if you put on good matches in the process you'll work up the card and then eventually you'll get a proper push. 

Edited November 9, 2025 by LaGoosh

[Supremo]

A broken brain to match her broken knees.

Wildly thick of them. Effectively ends whatever hope they have of being on mainstream pro-wrestling television.

Wrestlers are morons.

[Chili]

In fairness Anna Jay has never worked WWE, only Tay Melo. So by that margain I can understand why two former WWE performers would be iffy about losing to a former WWE performer AND an exclusively an AEW one, especially if Anna Jay was going to score the fall.

[burchybabi]

Apparently losing wasn’t the issue & they were wanting more time for the match.