10 Awesome AEW Booking Moments Nobody Ever Talks About
Deft distilled.
Tony Khan is the best booker of 2020. Nobody else comes close.
The best booker builds the most over acts. It's a symbiotic relationship, but one can't function without the other. WCW had Sting and Goldberg in 2000, and couldn't make any money. WWE has an endless pool of talent in 2020, but Vince took several sh*ts in it, and tried to bleach it with RAW Underground.
Darby Allin drew one million overall viewers for his well-built match with Ricky Starks on September 25. This was the culmination of patient, meticulous booking - which encouraged Allin's own artistic expression - spanning over a year. He was nearly there so often, in so many exceptional spirited defeats, that the audience was allowed to form their own organic connection with him. He wasn't so obviously meant to be a star that it manifested as an obnoxious, transparent reach. You wanted to see him overcome.
To build stars, you must prove yourself deft with the pen, and many of those stars resonated as they have because the booking, mostly, is fantastic: long-term in strategy and emotional in its heft.
It's even better than the fanatical praise would suggest.
10. Eddie Kingston Doesn't Quit
Everybody knows it's great.
It's a story of howling anguish richly informed by deep-rooted history. Eddie Kingston's bleeding heart has darkened after 18 years of the grind. He is projecting his failures outward. Jon Moxley is having none of it. He knows it's bullsh*t, but he can't be mad. It saddens him. Their promo war on the go-home Dynamite was out-of-this-world phenomenal; Kingston appeared to summon every occasion on which he was disrespected and politicked, using that grind as fuel to twist his snarl into a fury so authentic that for five glorious minutes this sh*t had to be real. It had to be.
And if there was one shred of doubt over how objectively perfect all this was - was Eddie Kingston: AEW World Champion even a remote possibility? - Kingston answered the question with a question.
How was he going to quit after he swore to his mother that he wouldn't?
That was a masterpiece twist on a great story, but the extent to which it is great really is astounding.
Booked at the eleventh hour after Lance Archer couldn't make the September 23 Dynamite, Moxley Vs. Kingston I ended via choke. He didn't quit. Back against the wall, Tony Khan booked a pay-per-view bloodbath - after a clean finish on TV! - that will allow the Mad King to cut a 20 minute promo.
There's accentuating the positives, and there's literally booking the best bespoke story for a performer ever.