10 Things You Learn Binge Watching Every WWE NXT TakeOver
1. The Pandemic Expedites The End
NXT was heading for a number of different icebergs in 2020, but like The Titanic itself, wealth and extravagance would have continued to obscure that until the brand fully capsized under the weight of its own arrogance in the end.
The NXT Capitol Wrestling Center was a marginally better solution to the empty arena feeling that WWE's original Performance Center tapings, but even when people came back, the grimy aesthetic was simultaneously too sludgy and too polished to register in the way Triple H intended.
Every aspect of the presentation was - the loud roaring music was fine when accompanied by loud roars supporting a popular and theoretically counter-culture brand, but those days had long, long passed. The last NXT logo under Triple H's original tenure was an abomination true to the mutated vanity spectacle the black-and-gold brand had become. A big chrome "X" atop the existing NXT logo with its own big X (as if 'The Game' wanted one each for him and Shawn Michaels) adorned with skulls couldn't have related less to the wrestlers coming through the curtain, further decreasing a decaying connection with a diminished and/or deadened crowd.
TakeOvers weren't without minor moments of magic. Mining 1995 for nostalgia was a choice, but June 2020's In Your House was a cute play on words and an aesthetic dream factory. TakeOver: XXX offered up Adam Cole and Pat McAfee's awesome payoff even if the atmosphere was too haunted for such charismatic figures. And Walter provided the brand's last classics against Tommaso Ciampa and Ilja Dragunov at TakeOver: Stand & Deliver 2021 and TakeOver:36 respectively.
But, like all too many classic NXT programmes, the ending was protracted and drawn out. The 2021 2.0 reboot wasn't for everybody, but it was more of a necessity than many were willing to admit.