AEW TV 2025 Discussion

[RedTwoster]

A decent show, with a weak opening and very weak crowd. 

That promo from Eddie Kingston was fine, but it wasn’t a promo from a man who might be winning the world title next week. At no point did he even mention the World title, let alone make you want to see him win the damn thing. He had it in him to cut a better promo than that, in which he articulated how much becoming World Champion meant to him, but he didn’t do that. And Joe, once again, resorted to tired, cheap heat, heeling on the crowd to try and get booed. I wasn’t impressed.

Similarly, Okada/Pac was the weakest match on the show. Okada is probably the best heel in the company, but he’s just as likely to have a mediocre match as he is a gripping one.

And talking of gripping matches, Fletcher/Knight was exactly that. Ordinarily, I’d have felt like the outcome was never in doubt, but in the CC, you just never know. Fletcher will definitely earn a men’s wrestler of the year nomination from me at the UKFF Awards, you can always rely on him to steal the show.

The women’s tag match was also fun, although I don’t think it was the right outcome. Bayne and Shafir as the first ever Women’s Tag Champs, having a dominant run in which they feel unstoppable just felt right to me. 

It was nice to see a Dark Order appearance, I maintain that they’re underutilised. They’re better in the loveable goofball role than the vast majority of The Conglomeration.

Moxley/Claudio was fun, and it was the right outcome as far as a storyline perspective is concerned. Mox is on the way out of that stable, and it would have made little sense for him to win.

Random thought, but I’d have bloody loved to have seen Brodie Lee in the CC. Maybe it’s because we’re approaching the anniversary of his death, but I found myself placing him in both brackets and thinking about the great matches we would have had.

I’ll finish with a hot take - El Clon is the worst AEW gimmick of all time, and the stupidest decision Tony Khan has made. He signs a unique wrestler and removes everything that makes him interesting. But heck, even if it was a bland fuck under that mask, it’s a terrible act. 

[LaGoosh]

I thought everything on the show that was non-Continental Classic was absolutely bloody awful. 

The womens tag tournament has been terribly booked and promoted throughout but a babyface vs babyface tournament final is such backwards booking I can't believe it. Surely Willow/Harley as the underdogs vs Bayne and Shafir as the dominant heels is the logical final? Insane that they didn't go with that.

Okada saying "everything that happened out there was Takeshita's fault" cracked me up. I love him.

Also cracked up at Renee Young saying "I spoke to Mox earlier today" yeah no shit, he's your husband.

Thankfully all the Continental Classic stuff was brilliant. Will post my positive thoughts in that thread.

Edited December 4, 2025 by LaGoosh

[RedTwoster]

41 minutes ago, LaGoosh said:

Okada saying "everything that happened out there was Takeshita's fault" cracked me up. I love him.

 

Yeah me too. There’s not a wrestler in AEW (perhaps even in wrestling) who plays the smug dickhead character as believably or amusingly as he does. The worst thing about AEW being a company drowning in title belts is that we’re in a situation in which their best heel wrestler isn’t challenging for the world title, let alone holding it. 

[Supremo]

1 hour ago, LaGoosh said:

I thought everything on the show that was non-Continental Classic was absolutely bloody awful. 

Surprised to hear this, as I enjoyed almost everything on the show!

Maybe the Continental Classic is a cheat code and it puts me in such a good mood that I forgive and have more time for stuff I otherwise wouldn’t, but I thought this was an excellent episode.

Eddie Kingston’s the best promo of all time. Even here, when he only turned it up to about six or seven, I was still ready to run through a wall for him. He has to win next week whether he wants to or not. Absolutely wild how quickly he went from Collision extra to World Champion Elect. He’s gonna eat him alive on the tenth! Do it, Tony. Do it!

Pac remaining the only man who can somehow pull off dressing like a generic Create a Wrestler after your save gets corrupted. Great opener. It’s amazing how quickly every match and every finish suddenly matters when you put it into a league format. Almost as if this medium works best as a simulated sport that you can manipulate to create the most drama and tension.

I understand why the Women’s Tag Final being babyface vs. babyface might not be the best route, but sometimes I just like seeing my favourites win, so I’m happy it’s my two favourite teams fighting for the belts. Babes of Wrath should win. I want to see Willow wearing gold in Manchester. I’ll be like my little sister seeing One Direction.

Outstanding match between Fletcher and Knight. Felt like watching the future.

Dark Order back on my TV! Yes! Hangman’s my boy, but it’s crazy how much taking the belt off him fixed The Timeline.

Hangman and Swerve Strickland tagging next week. Inject it straight into my veins.

As good a job as they’ve undoubtedly done with Marina, in the ratio of talent to exposure, she remains one of the worst wrestlers on television. Once the bell rings, I simply cannot suspend me disbelief or enjoy the fiction. I’m just watching someone struggling to hit the spots and remember the script. At one point, she got some tape out, suggesting she was going to wrap her hands in glass, and then she just didn’t. Get it together!

Dynamite Diamond Ring Battle Royale suggests an MJF return. Maybe MJF can win the ring and then get a Title shot against the new champ, Eddie Kingston. Go full Attitude Era, with the belt bouncing around before it returns to My Cowboy.

Fantastic main event. Proper stiff knockabout. I couldn’t take my eyes off Moxley at the end. Best story in wrestling right now. It’s coming crashing down and it hurts inside.

Two thumbs up. AEW heating up due to the Continental Classic is my new favourite Christmas tradition. I feel like Scrooge waking up Christmas morning. Everything is brilliant. God bless us, everyone.

Edited December 4, 2025 by Supremo

[LaGoosh]

1 hour ago, Supremo said:

As good a job as they’ve undoubtedly done with Marina, in the ratio of talent to exposure, she remains one of the worst wrestlers on television. Once the bell rings, I simply cannot suspend me disbelief or enjoy the fiction. I’m just watching someone struggling to hit the spots and remember the script. At one point, she got some tape out, suggesting she was going to wrap her hands in glass, and then she just didn’t. Get it together!

I think Marina is absolutely fantastic and has loads of the intangible qualities that a lot of wrestlers don't but they need to work very hard to protect and hide her weaknesses. Her matches need to be produced to every possible detail. 

[RedTwoster]

9 minutes ago, LaGoosh said:

I think Marina is absolutely fantastic and has loads of the intangible qualities that a lot of wrestlers don't but they need to work very hard to protect and hide her weaknesses. Her matches need to be produced to every possible detail. 

She’s a weird one in that you could feasibly make a case for her as a ‘best non-wrestler’ nominee for what she does on that side, and a ‘worst wrestler’ nominee for her in ring qualities. 

That said, I still think her spot in the DR could have gone to someone else, someone who would have been elevated by it and been able to bring it in ring - Statlander, Bayne, Aminata, Thekla, Serena Deeb and Athena, for example. Heck, I think Skye Blue is a dark horse candidate for a wrestler who could have excelled in the role. They may not have all played the role in the same way, but they would have been wrestlers who could step into a women’s world title match and seem formidable.

[tiger_rick]

3 hours ago, LaGoosh said:

I thought everything on the show that was non-Continental Classic was absolutely bloody awful. 

It's just so ice cold. I've not seen everything lately. Couldn't be arsed watching anything with that dick Flair on it so missed a few weeks and what I've seen since isn't doing a right lot for me. It's so cold, I can barely be arsed to post about it. 

It's also having the opposite effect on me where it's killing some enthusiasm for the C2. I'd love to me more in to Fletcher, Takeshita and Okada, for instance, but them being part of a bloated stable with fuck all going for it is a ballshrinker. 

I think fundamentally, AEW has been at it's best as a babyface promotion and the last few months have just been full of these cold, heel stables being all over the shows and so few babyfaces feeling hot. Only Hangman and Mark Briscoe have elicited any sort of excitement. Maybe Swerve coming back will help. If Eddie Kingston could be arsed, that would help. Kenny's stuff is so fucking paint-by-numbers, it's killing him.

2 hours ago, Supremo said:

Eddie Kingston’s the best promo of all time. Even here, when he only turned it up to about six or seven, I was still ready to run through a wall for him. He has to win next week whether he wants to or not. Absolutely wild how quickly he went from Collision extra to World Champion Elect. He’s gonna eat him alive on the tenth! Do it, Tony. Do it!

Let's ignore that first bit. Eddie's not in the top twenty. How on earth you feel the rest, I just don't know. I bloody love our mate @BomberPat but he's posted time and again since Eddie came back about the position he's been put in and while there's some truth there, surely Eddie has to take some heat for being fucking woeful? The promo on Collision was real good. His ring work has been fucking shit though. And this promo was bollocks. I can't decide if Samoa Joe is shite now or if he's portraying a character for cheap heat and to remain heel, as Eddie sort of inferred but, either way, he's a dreadful World Champion, is ice cold and Eddie did absolutely nothing to heat him up. 

Joe's winning, obviously, which is shit but equally ice cold Eddie winning the belt at this point would be the most underwhelming thing they've ever done. Winter really is coming.

43 minutes ago, RedTwoster said:

She’s a weird one in that you could feasibly make a case for her as a ‘best non-wrestler’ nominee for what she does on that side, and a ‘worst wrestler’ nominee for her in ring qualities. 

That said, I still think her spot in the DR could have gone to someone else, someone who would have been elevated by it and been able to bring it in ring - Statlander, Bayne, Aminata, Thekla, Serena Deeb and Athena, for example. Heck, I think Skye Blue is a dark horse candidate for a wrestler who could have excelled in the role. They may not have all played the role in the same way, but they would have been wrestlers who could step into a women’s world title match and seem formidable.

I think you're dead wrong here, Twoster. Hardly any of those people would be any good in the role. We'd seen most of them, we knew they weren't hard as nails and I can't possibly imagine a Sky Blue or Aminata gurning their way through this angle. I think Deeb could have done it a long time ago. Thekla is the other alternative. Hard to see a world in which they're as brilliant as Shafir at it though. I don't think her matches are that bad. They're not good but a lot of women's wrestling isn't good. I'm not being sexist about it, a lot of men's wrestling is fucking rubbish these days but, there are plenty of average workers who get a pass so she doesn't have to be brilliant - just passable - to fit in with the Anna Jay's, Tay Melo's, Julia Hart's and alll them NXT women who keep Botchamania in business of the world.

[Chris B]

Saw someone on BlueSky call Hangman and Swerve 'Whose Horse?' and that's their name now.

[LaGoosh]

Yeah I don't think anyone could have filled the role Shafir has half as well. She's perfect for it and her not being a traditional wrestler just really works.

Underrated Marina Shafir moment was when they aired this beautiful 3 minute long emotional heart wrenching video package for Hangman Page about getting back up again when you are knocked down and after it finished they cut to Shafir who just grabbed a mic and yelled like a maniac "Hangman! You are a PUSSY!". One of the best promos of the year.

[Chili]

Shafir is limited, but she looks intense as fuck in the role and it works. The Chyna effect I guess. Doesn't have to be a Joshi level in-ring talent if you develop enough of an aura. It wouldn't work with many others, Deeb and Statlander as previously mentioned probably could have. 

What's Britt Baker up to these days. Still injured or being kept off TV as a treat for us all.

[BomberPat]

Minoru Suzuki did an interview a few years back, where he put over Jon Moxley by saying how you could build the perfect wrestler from the ground up, but a whole roster full of those wrestlers would be boring, that what makes a wrestler stand out is what they can't do and how that dictates their work. That's Marina Shafir for me - she manages to be one of the worst wrestlers on TV, but one of the most compelling and interesting at the same time, because she's so well protected and largely sticks to shoot judo throws that she can definitely do well. She's been over-exposed by being in the Women's Tag Team Title tournament, and I don't think she ever should have been in there, because just as the kind of secret weapon for the Death Riders she's much better utilised.

 

As for this show - thank God for the Continental Classic, because I didn't care for much of the rest of this show. It's great to see Eddie Kingston in a World Title programme, but they haven't done the work to make him feel like a contender, and this promo didn't do it. Samoa Joe is at his best when he feels credibly threatening and effortlessly cool, but instead we got cheap heat "this town sucks and I have a private jet" Joe, and Eddie is at his best when he is so riled up that he forgets that wrestling's fake and starts shouting over people rather than taking it in turns to say lines with your hated rival, and we didn't get that version of Eddie. They were basically cutting separate promos in isolation. One of AEW's problems is that every story tends to only get one or two segments, where knowing there's a couple of weeks to build up an Eddie Kingston vs. Samoa Joe title match, I would have given this story more time - give Eddie a backstage promo or a career retrospective video package somewhere on this show. Nobody's believing that Eddie's going to win this, but it needs to be close enough that it's a heartbreaking loss. I could have done without them making it all about the most overused word in wrestling, "RESPECT" either.

I thought the Callis Family/Bucks/Omega/Jurassic Express segment was a complete mess. There's a hundred people in the Don Callis Family that could have been fed to the Bucks, but they had Kyle Fletcher take the BTE Trigger instead of a scrub like Rocky Romero. They didn't do enough to make Okada attacking the Young Bucks actually feel like a meaningful moment, and nor did anybody question why Kenny Omega took so fucking long to come out and save his mates - if part of the story is that they're still uneasily working out their friendship, maybe raise the question at least as to why Kenny wasn't out until so late in the segment?

The women's plunder match was pretty awful, and there were some dreadful backstage promos - Callis trying to explain splitting the Unified Title feels like Tony Khan has been gotten to by fans asking that question, and is trying to bullshit his way to an answer while putting the heat on Don, and there were two clunky Mark Briscoe segments almost back-to-back. 

The Continental Classic matches were good, and I know it's part of the tournament, but it could have been structured better to avoid having two heel vs. heel matches on the same show. Okada vs. PAC never got into its top gear, partly because there was no babyface, and partly because they needed to keep both men protected enough that neither feels like they lost a match while giving it their all, while Claudio and Moxley need to hold back on a real aggressive all-out match for the inevitable Death Riders split. I just wouldn't have done both on the same show. Kevin Knight was fantastic again, but I hope he doesn't make the coast-to-coast a regular part of his arsenal, and certainly not the set-up to his finisher, as I'd much rather it be kept as a rare impressive spot than a routine bit.

 

Hangman & Swerve vs. The Opps should be a good bit of business next week, but a lot of the rest of the show feels like people are spinning their wheels. 

[LaGoosh]

15 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

One of AEW's problems is that every story tends to only get one or two segments, where knowing there's a couple of weeks to build up an Eddie Kingston vs. Samoa Joe title match, I would have given this story more time - give Eddie a backstage promo or a career retrospective video package somewhere on this show. Nobody's believing that Eddie's going to win this, but it needs to be close enough that it's a heartbreaking loss. I could have done without them making it all about the most overused word in wrestling, "RESPECT" either.

Yeah this whole thing is rushed and it's shit. On paper a story based around Eddie Kingston being upset that Samoa Joe had corrupted his young protege HOOK and wants to fight him and take his title because of it is a good one. That would have required them to spend the proper time to establish Eddie & HOOK as a unit though and then spend the time establishing why HOOK would turn heel and join up with Samoa Joe. They haven't really done any of that though. To be honest I have no idea what this feud is about. Something to do with ROH? And Eddie gets a title shot because he beat Shibata? Pretty much everyone beats Shibata! Throw in Samoa Joe's weak as shit generic heel 101 promos and I don't really care about this at all. I should be buzzing off my head for Joe vs Eddie, c'mon.

Edited December 4, 2025 by LaGoosh

[Tim Healys Chutney Spoon]

On 11/22/2025 at 7:54 AM, Tim Healys Chutney Spoon said:

I'd love, for a short programme only, a callback to the Dark Order helping Hangman out if there's a beatdown after the main event. I know its probably only me that would want to see it and probably little to no logical reason for it to happen, but it would just put a smile on my face and be a brief moment of 'feeling good' with the AEW main event scene

TK reads this forum. I'm sure of it.

[RedTwoster]

1 hour ago, tiger_rick said:

I think you're dead wrong here, Twoster. Hardly any of those people would be any good in the role. We'd seen most of them, we knew they weren't hard as nails and I can't possibly imagine a Sky Blue or Aminata gurning their way through this angle.

The thing is, they wouldn’t have to. They’re different wrestlers, and their version of a Death Rider would be completely different than Shafir’s - as it should be. Skye Blue could have essentially played the character she does now during matches - someone willing to take enormous risks, relishing the opportunity to do so; grinning her way through the blood and violence in a very disconcerting way. The upside to her would be her wrestling ability - and the fact working with Moxley might assist with her promo skills, or at the very least would give her a promo. She’s not going to be the physical presence that Shafir is - but she’s the closest they have to a female death match style wrestler - someone willing to do the kind of things Moxley does. Unlike Shafir, she wouldn’t be gurning her way through segments or matches, she’d be smiling and generally acting unhinged. 

My take is, I guess, that there were other options and the stable could have been used to create a huge female star who could wrestle, rather than one who just can’t get the basics right in ring.

 

[DavidB6937]

37 minutes ago, LaGoosh said:

I should be buzzing off my head for Joe vs Eddie, c'mon.

Yeah, that's how I'm feeling. I love both guys and they can be the absolute best on the mic on any given day and yet throwing them together now is such a disappointment. Eddie's been on a weird journey since he's been back. Joe has been doing some pretty weak mic work and shouldn't even be champ. So we're getting both guys together at the worst time.

Neither man takes a lot to heat back up. Just let them do their thing. For whatever reason though, neither of them are anywhere near their best right now. I can usually be easily invested in both without them really trying.