Ranking The WORST Era Of Every Major Wrestling Show
3. AEW Dynamite
The best weekly episodic TV wrestling show ever has experienced more than one lull, which underscores that the model is inherently flawed. It can never be a watertight and complete "thing"; that it never ends exposes it to creative burnout, and there's no refresher of a break between "seasons" that allows the booker to meticulously plot out and consider every last detail.
What was so bad about the autumn of 2023 is that it felt like a betrayal.
By hoovering up all the great talent, promoting virtually every genre, forming countless inter-promotional relationships, and generally completing the checklist of what the millennial fan had missed out on for years, Tony Khan practically declared himself the regulator of professional wrestling. His catch-all "buffet" approach, intentionally or otherwise, left no other promoter with a single selling point of their own. A sort of entitled responsibility coursed through his promotion. It was AEW or nothing.
To do all that and then take a sports entertainment approach was really an insult. What's worse is that Tony Khan once said that Eric Bischoff was useful in that he'd learned from him what not to do - and yet, by almost copying WWE's vignette-heavy format, he repeated WCW's grave mistake of 1999.
The Undisputed Kingdom was formed in secret; MJF was thrown off the scent when the Devil "ADAM!" Cole and Roderick Strong filmed short videos in which they pretended to fall out. They fell out, in these Borashian videos, with awful NXT-style soundtracks and slo-mo comedy, when Strong spat out the coffee Cole had made him because it was too hot.
What a bone-chilling evil masterplan, one so abominable that it could only be the work of Satan himself.
MJF unfairly took a lot of flak for the philosophical death of the promotion - his World title reign when uneven peaked at seminal - and while he himself acknowledged this and promised to do better on Twitter, the whole show was a mess.
Kenny Omega and Don Callis feuded but it never ended. Or really even began; Omega didn't appear to feel too betrayed. The Young Bucks became the #1 contenders for the Tag Team titles and never expressed a desire to win them. The Blackpool Combat Club just did stuff, moodily, with a totally all over the place character alignment.
The Devil thing was just awful, primarily. The "masked men" looked like Dark Order Creepers, they "hacked" the show as visualised by awful lighting effects, and every character had to pretend that they cared about their identity even more, in the case of Jay White, than the AEW title.
Quiet, bemused crowds; appalling special effects; sub-WWE storytelling: TNA Dynamite was a bleak time.