It's Official: AEW Needs A MAJOR Wake-Up Call
The buzz is gone in All Elite Wrestling. It's time this was acknowledged.
Friday's edition of Rampage was the least-watched AEW TV show in history, drawing just 287,000 viewers and 0.07 in 18-49. It was a disaster. The different time slot cannot be used as an excuse; as Brandon Thurston of Wrestlenomics pointed out, the other lowest rating at 7PM was 0.15.
There is a tendency to catastrophise AEW when the rating is bad, or when they have the temerity to promote one middling episode after two months' worth of hot television.
Perspective is needed. This very month, on February 1, AEW Dynamite was #2 for the night on all of cable television. In a very positive new trend, AEW has for the first, sustained time in its near-four year history, attracted strong walk-up business for its TV tapings. This never used to happen; previously, the vast majority of tickets sold in one early surge. The string of awesome, action-heavy episodes in 2023 are fortifying the promotion's attendances. Tony Khan has solved a problem by effectively promoting his way around it. To the live crowd, anyway.
In 2023, AEW Dynamite has been a tremendous, if one-dimensional TV programme. The idea that AEW isn't telling stories or booking angles is moronic. Braindead. The matches are not random. You aren't watching a super-indie on television.
The troubling feeling that AEW is past its creative peak however is difficult to shake. Online "discourse" is a flawed metric prone to bias, depending on how one's social media activity is curated, but the general mood is low. The buzz barely exists.
Have you read a single sentiment to the effect of "AEW is at its very best right now?"
No, and that might very well be because it isn't. People said that in February 2020, in the summer of 2021, and in the build towards Revolution 2022. Nobody is saying it now.
The stories are there, but the creative, demonstrably, isn't connecting as well it has previously. There is nothing on the level of Hangman Page Vs. Kenny Omega or MJF Vs. CM Punk on AEW TV at present. Hell, outside of the MJF Vs. Bryan Danielson programme, nothing reaches the level of the super-detailed Jon Moxley Vs. Chris Jericho programme, and that wasn't even the second best storyline heading into Revolution 2020.
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