The Day WWE NXT Died
NXT has nonetheless settled into a new form that fuses the wacky with the incredibly serious. These two elements sit uneasily alongside one another - particularly since Karrion Kross can be accurately described as either - but this version of the show is an improvement, nonetheless, on the oppressive melodramatic grit and off-putting, rushed desperation of the Wednesday Night War. Cameron Grimes is a delight in a badly-needed second match comedy role; the Dexter Lumis/Indi Hartwell romance is inexplicably charming; the very high-end match quality is still just about up there with the best of the global scene. Finn Bálor's awesome technical intricacy was so great and by modern standards so compact that his old home of New Japan Pro Wrestling could and should learn from it.
The strange but no less welcome flavour of NXT Redemption is unfashionable, but then, NXT in general is, too. Daft WWE fun is far more palatable than NXT churning out a soulless approximation of mid-2010s indie wrestling. The ratings seem to agree with that assessment.
NXT, of course, used to be great, as nice as it was phenomenal.
NXT in 2021 is not great, and is no longer the preeminent critically acclaimed brand. The old identity - the WWE product so good and so life-affirming that it never felt like one - is dead. It has been subsumed by AEW, and the soul coursing through that promotion, with its proper pro wrestling energy and unscripted expression, is something WWE is constitutionally unwilling to adapt.
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