It's Official: A New Era Is Under Way In AEW
AEW was once ECW meets Mid-South Wrestling meets NJPW. It's something else in 2023...
When AEW launched, various promises were made, explicit or otherwise.
The press release heralding the debut of Dynamite on TV, as has been explained on this author page before, was essentially a barely-coded "We are here to do the things WWE don't do" plea for fan engagement.
President, founder and General Manager Tony Khan talked to the media at various points and spoke, encouragingly, of his influences. Even in 2021, 'Mid-South Tony' banged this drum. "My favourite title of the 1980s and my childhood is definitely the North American Title, that 26, sometimes they say 27 pounds of silver and gold," Khan told the Way of the Blade podcast. "And so I appreciate that the idea of title shots being hard to come by."
Beyond the imminent formal launch of Collision, itself a WWE-adjacent development, hard brand split or not, AEW is entering a different new era: Tony Khan's league is entering its every North American pro wrestling promotion ever phase.
Gone are the definitive, bold match finishes. In the early days of AEW Dynamite, name wrestlers lost cleanly. Prospects that AEW intended to catapult to the main event scene also lost cleanly. This puro-inspired model worked very effectively. Hangman Page lost to Chris Jericho, cleanly, at All Out 2019. He used the painful lesson of a real, sobering loss to drive his arc forward. The clean babyface loss was vital in accomplishing a new storytelling philosophy. Darby Allin also got over by tasting bitter defeat for which there were no excuses either (more on which imminently).
AEW hasn't descended entirely into WWE/TNA/WCW territory. None of those promotions had the drive or competence to plot something like the recent Elite Vs. Blackpool Combat Club programme, gruesome in its violence and elegant in its layered mystery.
Various core principles remain in play. Mercifully, the promos are not scripted by a hack team of writers; even when a feud hasn't been plotted in a particularly compelling way, the talent is entrusted to deliver a searing go-home speech. No other promotion pays as much attention to its characters and stories either. Even something minor, subplots like the dormant hatred between Trent and Wheeler YUTA or Jon Moxley and Preston Vance, displays the sort of continuity and thought missing from virtually every other US-based promotion ever. Daniel Garcia's character arc, a young lion's worked ill-fated excursion, could be the best story in wrestling, if they stick the landing.
The original booking framework however has crumbled.
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