10 Ways AEW Has Made Other Wrestling Unwatchable
3. Incredible Booking
Consider this: within the parameters of the storyline, had Cedric Alexander not joined the Hurt Business, they were going to attack him literally every single week until the end of time.
Randy Orton circumvented the selectively banned automatic rematch clause because he said so. Drew McIntyre is attempting to do the same thing on the "He started it!" principle that doesn't at all depict him as an insolent child.
The reasons why these people fight are incredibly thin and yet, somehow, they must be explained every single week via long and very slow promos cut under the laughable assumption that they then become profound.
New Japan has f*cked it as well. Match results no longer matter now, since the only real difference between Tetsuya Naito and Insert WWE Wrestler X is that he isn't laying down a challenge for "later tonight". IMPACT and ROH are booked solidly enough, but the output is aggressively fine/solid. Neither promotion has booked anything that you just have to go out of your way to see for quite some time now.
AEW just gets booking.
They grasp how to make you long to see a professional wrestling match by making you care about the characters that work them - the need to see Hangman Page recognise his own brilliance and goodness, the need to see Jon Moxley prevail over his latest challenge - and then making the wrestling match feel like a big deal by waiting more than a week to pull the f*cking trigger on it.