It's Official: The Modern Era Of Pro Wrestling Is DEAD

It's weird, and telling, that Tony Khan has tried to spin the state of AEW in 2023 by putting over his PPV product. Often following unfocused or plain dull builds, his talented roster smashes it when there's not much left for him to do, other than call the winner and tell the fans to get lost for...buying into the original vision.

It's Dynamite that Khan should be putting over.

AEW's booking is looser now, maybe even broken, but in many ways is a victim of its own incredible success and enthusiasm. After four years of seminal brilliance, this is a natural time to feel a sense of fatigue. AEW has exacerbated that with its now monthly very long PPVs, five hours a week of TV, generally excessive approach, frantic pacing. The First Dance might be key to all this, too. It was unprecedented that a top star with such mythology surrounding him, the never in never say never, could return after seven years. It had never been done, and what's worse is that it was so great. The viral marketing campaign, the verbal war with Eddie Kingston, the genius MJF programme. CM Punk was thought gone forever. How can any wrestling promoter engineer that level of hype and anticipation ever again?

It is "lame" to admit this, but Brawl Out didn't help. Everybody should be over it by now, but they aren't.

The magic of AEW has waned, and where it once felt like the wider world of wrestling was in an arms race to deliver the best scene, half a decade later, it has all but vanished. BritWres died and probably deserved it, but WWE hardly helped by decimating the talent pool via NXT UK, which no longer exists because it was so bereft of anything vaguely interesting beyond WALTER and Ilja Dragunov. New Japan - the resurgence of which lasted far longer than most hot streaks - is mostly an echo of better days in 2023. It has finally struggled, where it once excelled, at replacing its fleet of top stars. That the very long, epic main event style remains Gedo's preference is less than ideal. It's daunting and overexposed all at once.

STARDOM is great, but difficult to invest in. While this is being addressed, the aggressive expansion of the schedule has created an injury crisis. The upcoming TNA reboot might draw interest for the debut show, but they don't offer anything that AEW does not. ROH, an imposition most of the time, is AEW lite with a General Manager. Athena is great, but should be on cable television. Great wrestling still exists on the global fringe - Astronauts are the hipster choice du jour - but then, this was always the case. Great wrestling has always existed and continues to exist, provided you are willing to hunt it down. The idea of a movement, a boom, a true pioneering state-of-the-art scene is gone, subsumed by a promotion - AEW - that has been warped into an identity crisis. We are in the aftermath of that movement now.

Having made its major label debut of sorts, across NXT and AEW, what's left of independent wrestling in the US is...not so good. It feels like so many of them - those not doing phenomenally outdated irony schtick - are working as if Gabe Sapolsky is still a tastemaker. EVOLVE died years ago, and he was past it by then!

Across the board, without trying to do a Rip Rogers, the endless chop battles and fire-ups feel more often than not like a derivation of a derivation of imported strong style psychology lacking almost entirely in soul. This is the post-hybrid style landscape, and it's all very homogenised.

Speaking Out did not help. It didn't help transform the industry, sadly, and if your favourite wrestler wasn't exposed as a piece of trash, they in a lot of cases either remained friendly with pieces of trash, didn't condemn pieces of trash, or worked alongside pieces of trash. That movement shattered the idea, cultivated by the meet-and-greet circuit and the vlogs and the like, that these people were better than the awful generations that preceded them, or even your friends.

Now this might be skewed, since this is written from the perspective of a constantly tired, 38 year-old father of two young children, but is the overall vibe not a bit...screwed?

Take WWE out of the equation, and focus on pro wrestling.

Is the vibe not screwed?

CONT'D...(4 of 5)