10 Secrets Behind AEW's Booking Magic
1. Stakes And Drama
How many times have you fretted that, in AEW's biggest matches, nobody could "afford" to lose? And how many of those wrestlers lost, definitively, and found themselves normalised, buried, or without purpose?
Lots, and not a lot.
Chris Jericho can't lose, he's only defended the belt on one PPV. Jon Moxley can't lose, they've spent too much time building him. Cody can't lose, he'll have "nothing to do" if he can't challenge for the title. Brodie Lee can't lose, he just got here and it's his first pay-per-view.
Somebody has to lose; otherwise there are no winners. A loss is embraced, acknowledged, and only after the work is done, absolved.
Jericho lost, but he established the title's prestige and worked towards getting the new faces over. Moxley won, and became the Wednesday night king. Cody lost, and summoned a preternatural knack of crafting grudge rivalries beyond the title picture. Brodie Lee lost, and subsequently somehow got the Dark Order over.
AEW wants to make wrestling big-time again, and not just by drawing basketball-sized arenas. They want it to feel enormous, exciting, relevant.
AEW's quarterly pay-per-view cycle functions to make every main event feel like all or nothing. They want you to think that the person who loses loses everything, that they'll have to climb the mountain all over again if they do.
The feeling so many wrestling fans seem to worry about - about where everybody goes next, and how drastically low those options appear to be - is pure drama. Gravity. Consequence.
They'll mock AEW, for presenting Mimosa Mayhem matches and labelling itself a "sports-oriented" product. But it was never about the presentation.
It was always about the feeling.