10 Major Unanswered Questions About AEW
Boom goes the Dynamite?
On September 25th right around the time many folk in the United Kingdom would be wrapping up their work for the day, an ITV representative sent out a Tweet confirming with misplaced confidence that AEW Dynamite would be screened in edited form five days after airing live in the United States at the rather unappealing time of 11:45pm.
It kicked off a chain of events that resulted first in ITV's official account weighing in with a slightly different date and time, before Tony Khan himself was railroaded into confirming that the group had brokered a $4.99 per month streaming deal with Fite TV after thousands voiced their displeasure with what felt distinctly like a deal gone bad.
The sense of entitlement wasn't unfounded - Cody rather arrogantly asserted that AEW would have a far better TV deal in Great Britain than WWE following news trickling through that Vince McMahon's 30-year relationship with Sky was ending just after the eventually-named Dynamite was set to begin. Links with terrestrial giant ITV and its equally free sister station ITV4 appeared fragile in the wake of the chaos, but damaged even more so was an ironclad bond the AEW lot had forged with their new fanbase.
What happened there? And what of the other mysteries currently surrounding a product on the verge of a genuinely historic televised launch?
10. What Happened With ITV?
It may never be fully revealed what on earth happened between Cody's aggrandising over the weekend of Double Or Nothing and the reveal - precisely a week before AEW Dynamite's debut - that the TNT wouldn't be airing live for free on the terrestrial network as planned.
Pay-per-month/episode options through Fite TV were explained on Twitter by Tony Khan in an effort to stem the frustration and fury brewing on the platform, but it'd be naive to assume he dreamt this up entirely when he saw just how feisty it was getting in the bowels of his Twitter mentions.
Had AEW had the Fite deal tabled all along, hence their radio silence with ITV? Was a total collapse of a communication between the station and whomever was sent to seal the deal? Had ITV in fact expressed a reduced interest for some time, resulting in AEW trying to craft this as a Plan B rather than the cake-and-eat-it roll out of the steaming options and a pathetically pointless highlight show days removed from the original airing.
How did it fail? Who was responsible? What made them think simply delaying it would help? No answers here, but The Khans and Cody would probably rather we make like Roddy Piper and change the questions.