14 Ups & 4 Downs For AEW In 2020
1. Honourable Mentions
It's almost unfair not to pay respect to some of those individual moments, the consistent performance of talent, the creative team, and the realisation of the narrative framework.
Eddie Kingston nearly retired in the spring, he was making that little money on the indies. By the autumn, he sold a mainstream wrestling pay-per-view by getting in Jon Moxley's face and telling him, with terrifying energy, that he never got married because he spent two decades chasing World Championship glory for his proud mother.
Team Taz are an absolutely awesome heel unit with abundant main event potential. Ricky Starks needs to get strapped up by 2022 at the latest.
Tony Khan booked an incredible, low-key - and deft - angle when FTR debuted. He teased the dream match, set forth the plan to shatter the Elite, built two TV matches, the formation of a new tag team, and the formation of a new stable in one tremendous TV wrestling segment that accounted for all-important babyface psychology via Marq Quen's storyline injury - which itself informed the heft of his best singles performance.
The weirdly maligned rankings system informed the storytelling as much as emotional grudge-based conflict did, as best exemplified by the stunning layout and permutations of the pre-All Out Gauntlet tag.
Serena Deeb ruled. Sammy Guevara created a wave of memes. Chris Jericho did everything in his power to get several generations of talent over. You know those old three-disc WWE biography DVDs? Jericho did enough in 2020 alone to fill one with rampantly entertaining content. Even the unfairly maligned Jake Hager popped your t*ts off with his deadpan and carried himself as formidable threat in a handful of super-underrated tags alongside Chris Jericho.
More awesome moments will have been missed.
It was simply, somehow, that great a year under awful, awful conditions.