It's Official: A New Era Is Under Way In AEW
It's just so redundant and carny at this point, a constant blur of schmozz that reeks of cowardice. He rarely wants to be beat anybody anymore, does Tony, but not doing that means nobody really wins, either. Who's winning the feud between Jay White and Ricky Starks, a programme that beat-for-beat could have happened on the midcard of a WWE TV show? Does anybody care?
The puro-inspired model has disintegrated.
Why?
Why is all of this happening?
The first point to make here is that AEW is A) still excellent and best-in-class at its peak and B) a victim of its own success. Tony Khan raised the bar to seminal in the summer of 2021; "very good to great but flawed and often tiresome" just isn't good enough in comparison.
The roster is too big, five hours of primetime television or no. There are too many wrestlers to appease, and with that comes compromise. The debut of Collision, the CM Punk vanity vehicle, represents the most extreme aspect of this take - but it's almost everywhere within AEW.
Compromise is a theme. Adding more belts to the product allows more wrestlers to win, but then, you compromise on what achievement actually represents. Tony Khan has compromised the original vision to keep many of his star names happy and "winning". And when he can't seem to make a decision on who's going over, he's guilty of procrastination. Does anybody care about Keith Lee Vs. Swerve Strickland at this point?
In another worrying development, Khan's lack of focus - he has ROH to book, more hours of AEW TV, his other two full-time jobs - has allowed certain members of his team to creep into the mix. The results are uneven, but his creative assistants and producers get a lot of TV time in 2023. QT Marshall, Jeff Jarrett, Sonjay Dutt, Billy Gunn: Rampage especially is teeming with nepotism. This issue has plagued wrestling for years, and while AEW was always guilty of it, Luther and Brandon Cutler were either barely on TV or fun background players who didn't get in the way. Several employees are now major attractions on the show, and many of them, with their backgrounds and creative influence, have contributed to the overall feeling of slop - even if certain segments are entertaining in isolation. The whole "wrestling needs veterans to guide the youngsters along" maxim has been ruthlessly exposed this year. Working with veterans has actually cooled off HOOK and Private Party considerably.
CONT'D...(4 of 5)