It's Official: WWE NXT Has Jumped The Shark

Keith Lee
WWE

Formula crept in. Fans loved most the serious business of the TakeOver shows, and so that became the tone: super-intense Great Wrestling put over and built towards with generic operatic writing and its one-note semantic field of moments and legacies and the like.

And, all the while, Mauro Ranallo and Corey Graves screamed directly into your eardrums, furthering the effect of non-stop intensity. NXT by 2018 had begun to take itself with the utmost seriousness. It then extended an invitation to parody as an inevitable result.

It may not be fair to make this judgment now, what with NXT playing to no crowds. But the empty gym is not the problem; the empty gym brings the root problem into focus.

This growing synthetic quality now cannot be escaped with no fans to obscure it. It's as if the complacency has set in to such a weird extent that the NXT think tank operates now on autopilot with no real thought behind it. It's almost as if NXT is not written, but programmed. Look at what the bot coded for last week's North American Title main event between Keith Lee, Damien Priest and Dominik Dijakovic. Beyond the usual regulation entrances and crowd appeals that look bizarre now, that match played almost entirely to a crowd that wasn't there. It was the strangest, dumbest thing.

CONT'D...(4 of 6)

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Contributor
Contributor

Michael Sidgwick is an editor, writer and podcaster for WhatCulture Wrestling. With over seven years of experience in wrestling analysis, Michael was published in the influential institution that was Power Slam magazine, and specialises in providing insights into All Elite Wrestling - so much so that he wrote a book about the subject. You can order Becoming All Elite: The Rise Of AEW on Amazon. Possessing a deep knowledge also of WWE, WCW, ECW and New Japan Pro Wrestling, Michael’s work has been publicly praised by former AEW World Champions Kenny Omega and MJF, and current Undisputed WWE Champion Cody Rhodes. When he isn’t putting your finger on why things are the way they are in the endlessly fascinating world of professional wrestling, Michael wraps his own around a hand grinder to explore the world of specialty coffee. Follow Michael on X (formerly known as Twitter) @MSidgwick for more!