Every Major Wrestling Debut TV Show Ranked From Worst To Best
Did AEW Dynamite blow away the competition?
AEW faced immense expectation last night—much of it cultivated through their own making.
In the original press release, AEW promised “less scripted, soapy drama” than the competition—and more “fast-paced, high-impact competition” that aimed to “introduce statistics to wrestling for the first time ever, deepening fan engagement”.
Executive Vice President Cody smashed thrones, and buried WWE performers and lame tropes alike. Kenny Omega, to even more of a divisive reaction, slaughtered the sacred cow of its competitor NXT. PR, promotion, or unnecessary, alienating flex?
The time for truly exhausting and borderline toxic speculative discourse is, at last, over. Fans and critics can now judge AEW Dynamite on what it is, and not the deeply lofty projections imposed on it—projections that had created a war amongst the fandom before Vince McMahon did, in truth. Was it a triumph? Failure?
And how did it stack up against not just its Wednesday Night Wars competition, but the history of debuting, major* pro wrestling TV shows?
*Major here, for the sake of clarity, refers to North American TV shows broadcast nationally comprised fully of original footage (hence the absence of WCW Saturday Night and its revolutionary antecedent). Major refers to the same scrutiny of exposure AEW faces, not the historical importance of regional broadcasts…
...with one glaring exception...
14. ECW On TNN
A disaster that doomed the relationship between promotion and broadcaster as swiftly and decisively as Shane Douglas threw down the NWA World Heavyweight Title, Paul Heyman defied his new masters from the very first show.
TNN demanded original content, but Heyman, a perfectionist who at this point was on a Vince McMahon sleep schedule, scrapped the material cobbled from the first shoot. He wasn’t happy with it, and TNN wasn’t happy with the clip show presented to them, feeling, quite fairly, that it was effectively the opposite of a TV pilot. Heyman was an amateur operator to TNN; TNN, to Heyman, were overbearing regulators who only wanted a glorified pilot as pretext to an eventual full order of WWF programming.
This mutual “F*ck ‘em” manifested in the debut show, which utilised very good clips, at least. Jerry Lynn Vs. Rob Van Dam was a genuine jaw-dropper of a series for its time.
The relationship was untenable, and so was the promotion. Heyman, one of wrestling’s greatest ever promos, said it best: ECW was “too big to be small and too small to be big”. The aesthetic, philosophy and stars had been subsumed by the WWF, the charm had long since gone, and it was a case of wrong place, wrong time.