10 Problems Nobody Wants To Admit About NXT
1. There Is But One Feeling
And that feeling is adrenaline.
The Slipknot theme tune, Mauro Ranallo's incessant screeching, the intimate, furnace atmosphere in Full Sail, the simple plot advancement through beat-downs and furniture destruction, and the brawls, Jesus Christ, the brawls. That first USA show ended with a nonsensical melee in which everybody, for no reason, grunted and punched to send the show off the air. This functioned only to trigger an endorphin rush. It was an empty high.
NXT is a high-intensity battleground comprised almost exclusively of incredible athletes in unreal shape seeking to prove themselves in exhilarating, physical match-ups. You could almost describe the roster as "wild and young", and it's absolutely electric, of course it is, but the show suffers from significant tonal issues.
It just isn't fun. The fun begins and ends with based God Kyle O'Reilly's irrepressible charm.
The entire process is precision-engineered to elicit bloody-throated excitement and adrenaline, and it's all too often inhibitive of emotional storytelling. It is super-serious business that aims, always, for epic, and it's suffocating. There is no longer any lightness to it, no pathos of an old vet like William Regal getting his fingers broken, no witty, improvised repartee, no risk or roughness.
Everything is precise and clinical and so premeditatedly good that it just becomes soulless, which is ironic, for all the ceaseless talk of "heart".