10 Things AEW Wants You To Forget About 2023
8. Not Great PPV Builds
AEW promoted some of the best wrestling matches ever on pay-per-view this year, and the range was incredible. The best Iron Man match ever, the best technical wrestling match ever, the best Death Match ever, some of the best, most crazed arena and stadium-wide brawls you're ever like to see: AEW is the self-styled "buffet", and its fans ate very well.
For six nights of the year.
AEW's TV output was wildly uneven, more on which imminently, and some episodes of Dynamite and Collision peaked at amazing - but the TV exists to build a destination event, and how often did AEW really make your heart pound in anticipation ahead of a major PPV weekend?
MJF Vs. Bryan Danielson was the most well-promoted match ahead of Revolution, and while it was wonderful to watch the Dragon run through a sublime gauntlet of different, exquisite pro wrestling matches, the story was a bit familiar four years into the promotion's history.
The Elite Vs. Blackpool Combat Club programme carried the Double Or Nothing build - the Four Pillars Four-Way was a noble failure undermined by each challenger deciding that something called the "worked shoot" was a cool, state-of-the-art device - and it still wasn't great. The brawls ruled, but why, really, were the BCC and the Elite fighting? Bryan Danielson was basically playing a proxy CM Punk. The whole thing felt hollow and convoluted.
Forbidden Door and WrestleDream benefitted from a pared-back approach - the best wrestlers wrestled the best wrestlers to determine who is the absolute best - but the All In/All Out double-header was an irritating venture into the content farm era. The build to MJF Vs. Adam Cole was funny, emotional, compelling, unpredictable - almost every type of good story in one package - but elsewhere, Christ.
Kenny Omega working a glorified Dynamite match in Wembley Stadium was stupid, and the people who defended it are those who will watch AEW because of its initials alone no matter how poor it might become.