The Rise & Fall Of TNA | Wrestling Timelines

3. December 21, 2018 | Cold Pursuit

A meagre 140,000 is the best number that Impact can muster on Pop TV, but the move to a new station, Pursuit, is not great news. 

Pursuit is available in even fewer homes (30M), and is an outdoors and hunting channel that nobody with a tentative interest would even begin to think would air pro wrestling, if they were bored enough to trawl through the upper reaches of the TV listings to begin with. This seems inexplicable, and mostly is, but the deal is made because A) Impact was rejected by an assortment of networks and B) Pursuit is partially owned by Anthem. This, obviously, rules out anything remotely orbiting a rights fee. 

Impact is just waiting around to die at this point, sustained, barely, by its international distribution. It’s grim. There is no place for it. There’s a fiercely dedicated sect of wrestling fans out there who treat the latest burial of a supernatural wrestler in WWE as a national tragedy, but the reception of the Impact ‘Undead Realm’ material suggests that they are a vocal minority, and that Hardy's personality, not the elastic reality, drove the success of the Broken gimmick.

If there was even a remote opportunity to tempt back fans disillusioned with WWE and Vince McMahon’s WCW 2000-level creative, well, tough: the heavily rumoured All Elite Wrestling league, powered by the hottest fleet of free agents in history and a genuine movement supported by the success of BTE and the independent All In pay-per-view, is days away from being announced to the world.