10 Things WWE Suddenly Wanted You To Care About (After Programming You To Hate Them)
1. Independent Wrestling
When WWE debuted Daniel Bryan in WWE, in 2010, his background was used as a shovel with which to bury him.
The monopoly, historically adverse to putting over anything created beyond itself, referred to Ring Of Honor et al. under the amorphous "Indy" pejorative, instructing the audience that Bryan had performed for "50" people in "high school gyms", and the only people interested in him were his fellow "tweetin', bloggin'" dirtsheet-obsessed nerds.
Meanwhile, everybody was left to infer that Wade Barrett et al. had simply arrived, fully-formed and WWE-ready, from some sort of laboratory. That laboratory was Florida Championship Wrestling, a sub-company that was essentially kept secret in WWE canon, and with sound reasoning: high school gyms at least have bleachers. The glorified warehouse of FCW was all empty seats and WWE-lite action, but the students were learning the 'WWE way', and that was paramount.
Until the model ceased to function effectively, and WWE was forced to acknowledge a strong Indy background as a reason to take the stars of the retooled NXT seriously. When the latest star recruits were captured on camera at TakeOver events, WWE couldn't exactly bury them. '[X] is from Japan!' commentary would state emphatically, as if that mattered all of a sudden.
Now, the tedious grapple-f*ck stylings of EVOLVE is presented as a proving ground, hilariously, because it was used to counter-programme AEW.