10 Red Flags For The Future Of Triple H's WWE
4. Everything That Happened To NXT In The End
A multifarious nightmare of a show by the time the letters were ripped away from him and pelted with a paintball gun, everything that NXT once stood for was bastardised and broken by the time a necessary "2.0" makeover took place.
Overexposure and over-indulgence were common complaints of the weekly show from mid-2019 onwards, as attempts to book dependable episodic television were undermined by panicking through weekly ratings defeats. AEW Dynamite's freshness and quality rendered NXT dated anyway, but when the pandemic struck six months into the war, the gap between the two shows somehow widened even further.
All Elite Wrestling shouldn't have ran shows anymore than WWE, but for two hours a week, the empty Daily's Place actually performed wrestling's key function of distracting its viewers from the real world. In contrast, WWE and especially NXT tried first to no-sell the circumstances before leaning into cartoonish nonsense, under-thought average matches and lashings and lashings of grit and grime.
It was the polar opposite of what people wanted or needed, all produced by people refusing to believe there was a problem. The Capitol Wrestling Center doubled down on the issues while pretending it was re-establishing identity, but whatever "black-and-gold" had once been was now long lost.
WWE is too insulated for that to happen, but Hunter himself might not be.