It's Official: AEW Is Actually BACK
All Elite Wrestling - after trying to force it - is officially there.
What is “the feeling”?
It’s a marketing tactic in 2024, an old trick borrowed from the competition. Faced with an onslaught of criticism amid haemorrhaging TV ratings, WCW attempted something similar in April 2000. The promotion was “reset”; every title was vacated and everything started anew. The idea, and it failed spectacularly, since it was Vince Russo’s and Eric Bischoff’s, was to wash away the stigma and stench of bad TV death with one quick blast of a hosepipe. It didn’t work; WCW realised that the fans wanted to see some new blood in the main event scene, but the resulting meta storyline of young versus old was awful. The premise was refreshing, but the plotting was as asinine as ever. WWE apologised for its own awful creative in December 2018, but the promise to do better was rather undermined as they entered 2019: the worst year of Vince McMahon’s creative ever.
AEW are in the process of doing something similar with this “Restore the Feeling” business. In 2023, the feeling was gone. The creative wasn’t amazing, at all, but four years is a long time to watch something non-stop. AEW was deeply uneven. The peaks existed, but years removed from mid-2010s NXT, peak NJPW, and AEW’s own seminal library, the idea of a b a n g e r was no longer refreshing. Greatness had been normalised.
AEW was a victim of its own success. The greed of signing every top name and the entitlement of promoting every aspect of “good” wrestling had already manifested with a sense of fatigue even before the Devil storyline stung like a betrayal. And a betrayal it was. AEW, the supposed alternative, had flirted with the worst elements of sh*tty US wrestling TV: mystery reveals, soundtracked skits, bad comedy, broad, idiotic characters, the empty, carny promise of something happening next week.
It was a facetious and cynical thought, but the idea that all WWE had to do was get rid of Vince McMahon and become a coherent, basics-forward product to reach a new level of acclaim was not unfounded. The good thing about being bad is that anything better than bad is good in contrast.
AEW conducted its own exercise in contrast towards the end of 2023. The MJF World title reign (the first half of which was incredible) reached an awful nadir during the dismal show-long storyline at Full Gear. The idea that Adam Cole could replace MJF in the main event despite being more injured was atrocious. This unfathomable plot hole underscored that AEW, with its overambitious and cynical response to accusations of “not telling stories”, had quite literally lost the plot.
The Continental Classic was excellent, but you could also argue that the tournament was cynical, too; after all, was there a more easy means of playing to the gallery than “Let’s do a G1 Climax!”?
Tony Khan said the quiet part loudly when announcing the tournament at the Full Gear press conference. He told the dissenters to put their money where their f*cking mouth is. There was an almost spiteful motive behind the C2, and if that's too much, it was certainly a transparent scramble to recover the identity of the promotion.
The exercise in PR rehabilitation worked.
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