Why AEW Rampage Hasn't Quite Worked (Yet)
Friday nights are ALRIGHT for fighting...but they could be a lot better.
Wrestling is often analysed in restrictive and derivative binaries.
The title of this very article is an attempt to not do that on the subject of AEW Rampage. All Elite Wrestling's one hour Friday show has been on the air for a couple of months, which is just enough time to file a report card but nowhere near long enough to bury/champion it as either a total catastrophe or remarkable success.
Certainly not from an earnest critical perspective anyway. And that's the point of all this - by still being a professional wrestling product at its core, AEW can actually be assessed as professional wrestling.
The shows dutifully conform to the useful old Paul Heyman adage. "For those who get it, no explanation is necessary, for those that don't, none will do" used to apply to the entire industry but it seems now to capture why fans feel what they do for this specific company. Lapsed fans are finding this show and remembering why they once might have loved wrestling, even if some unsuspecting newcomers haven't (yet) gravitated towards it. For years, bad faith actors asked exhausted WWE viewers to blindly and toxically praise a weak product, daring to suggest that fans would rather complain about a company than enjoy one. Those same folk are now seething at the state of people having a whale of a time watching AEW.
One only need watch an episode of Dynamite or Rampage to see the unbridled joy on display for almost every match and angle.
Almost.
And about that...
CONT'D...