Every Major Wrestling Debut TV Show Ranked From Worst To Best

14. ECW On TNN

A disaster that doomed the relationship between promotion and broadcaster as swiftly and decisively as Shane Douglas threw down the NWA World Heavyweight Title, Paul Heyman defied his new masters from the very first show.

TNN demanded original content, but Heyman, a perfectionist who at this point was on a Vince McMahon sleep schedule, scrapped the material cobbled from the first shoot. He wasn’t happy with it, and TNN wasn’t happy with the clip show presented to them, feeling, quite fairly, that it was effectively the opposite of a TV pilot. Heyman was an amateur operator to TNN; TNN, to Heyman, were overbearing regulators who only wanted a glorified pilot as pretext to an eventual full order of WWF programming.

This mutual “F*ck ‘em” manifested in the debut show, which utilised very good clips, at least. Jerry Lynn Vs. Rob Van Dam was a genuine jaw-dropper of a series for its time.

The relationship was untenable, and so was the promotion. Heyman, one of wrestling’s greatest ever promos, said it best: ECW was “too big to be small and too small to be big”. The aesthetic, philosophy and stars had been subsumed by the WWF, the charm had long since gone, and it was a case of wrong place, wrong time.