10 Times AEW Were Moments From Disaster

9. A Global Pandemic

Daniel Garcia
AEW

The world had more to worry about than the fate of a few wrestling storylines when the pandemic forced a shut down of just about everything in March 2020, but All Elite Wrestling's response to impossible circumstances served as the defining characteristic of the brand's first year in business.

Rebooting and rebuilding during a scaled back month of tapings in QT Marshall's gym, AEW Dynamite combined fortuitousness with ingenuity in turning the Daily's Place amphitheatre into a new home base for wrestling as an escapist medium all over again.

Extremely tight stories helped glue remarkable matches together, with divisions stewarded by trusted and authoritative Champions and contenders. At the top of that pile, Jon Moxley and Cody Rhodes provided same-but-different security that everything might be alright in the end in reality whilst simultaneously assuring it in the fiction.

Brand loyalty is a strange and unique thing to capture in an industry like professional wrestling, but AEW gobbled up years of good will from a situation that bent then broke WWE's rigid and risible structure.

 
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Contributor

Michael is a writer, editor, podcaster and presenter for WhatCulture Wrestling, and has been with the organisation nearly 8 years. He primarily produces written, audio and video content on WWE and AEW, but also provides knowledge and insights on all aspects of the wrestling industry thanks to a passion for it dating back over 35 years. As one third of "The Dadley Boyz" Michael has contributed to the huge rise in popularity of the WhatCulture Wrestling Podcast and its accompanying YouTube channel, earning it top spot in the UK's wrestling podcast charts with well over 62,000,000 total downloads. He has been featured as a wrestling analyst for the Tampa Bay Times, GRAPPL, GCP, Poisonrana and Sports Guys Talking Wrestling, and has covered milestone events in New York, Dallas, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, London and Cardiff. Michael's background in media stretches beyond wrestling coverage, with a degree in Journalism from the University Of Sunderland (2:1) and a series of published articles in sports, music and culture magazines The Crack, A Love Supreme and Pilot. When not offering his voice up for daily wrestling podcasts, he can be found losing it singing far too loud watching his favourite bands play live. Follow him on X/Twitter - @MichaelHamflett