12 Times AEW Was Better Than Literally EVERYTHING
It’s called All Elite Wrestling for a reason.
Is AEW - already - the best wrestling promotion ever?
This is what this list attempts to argue.
It’s far from perfect. Dynamite even at its seminal peak is too rushed and formulaic as a TV show. It’s also - and this is deeply unfortunate, given the early sports-oriented messaging - too silly and trivial. The various crimes, the wacky angles that invariably utilise pathetic, fake props, the consistent failure of the self-indulgent commentary team to believably sell serious, emotion-driven angles: AEW does sometimes feel like it isn’t “proper”, if that’s the word.
AEW can also be fairly accused of living down to its reputation as a company that exists solely to put on "the best matches". You’d be a bad faith operator to accuse AEW of not telling stories, but the relentless All-Star Eight-Man tags, overused plunder, Collision in general: it’s pure critical acclaim doping at times.
You could easily argue that New Japan Pro Wrestling embarked on a single classic era, the 2011-2019 resurgence and U.S. expansion, that was superior to and has outlasted AEW’s entire existence to this point - and that’s without factoring in the promotion’s massively popular 1990s heyday. If using objective commercial measurements, obviously, WWE is the best literal “promotion”. ECW was far more creative and influential. Jim Crockett Promotions almost perfected the ‘trifecta’ of great pro wrestling - matches, angles, promos - and its best stuff was so believable, and soulful, that it withstands time’s test better than any promotion of yore.
If you think about what makes a great promotion, across every category, AEW might still have peaked higher than any other competitor…
12. The Kenny Omega Vs. Hangman Page Storyline
Traditional pro wrestling heat barely exists, which is less than ideal. The mainstream U.S. scene is still modelled to chase an unrecoverable emotion. When was the last time you earnestly felt moved by the conduct of a heel? Without playing along through an admiration of their performance?
For many, it was 2020-2021.
Hangman Page Vs. Kenny Omega was the storyline that best captured relatable audience investment in a time defined by social media. The misleading, glamorous lives our peers apparently live make it difficult to feel a true sense of self-worth. Many of us are anxious that we don’t compare.
Page never felt Elite, and the buy-in was easy; he in 2019 was a very good worker and one of the funnier cast members of Being The Elite, but he wasn’t Kenny Omega. He’d never drawn money nor worked a truly iconic singles match. Kenny had worked so many of them that it defined his persona.
They tagged at Kenny’s urging, the reason behind which slowly became apparent: Omega was in decline, he knew Page was his successor deep down, and he wanted to use him. Page scored the falls in their successful Tag Team title defences, but Omega still treated Page like he was doing him a favour. The fans caught on, and gravitated towards Page, who in parallel was putting forward genuinely hilarious character work. At All Out '20, Omega had the temerity to abandon Page, even though he had carried the team. This catalysed their singles feud, and put Page all the way over as a man who was Elite. The fans just needed to convince him.
MJF Vs. CM Punk, conversely, somehow generated the real stuff. MJF was such a manipulative sociopathic piece of sh*t that it felt like he’d travelled back in time to a period where we could all get truly lost in the fiction.