The Rise & Fall Of WWE NXT
The transformative effect NXT had on the overall WWE fan experience was mesmerising.
For years and years and years, World Wrestling Entertainment strived to exist in an area so grey that everybody just got lost in the fog. It became an accepted norm that John Cena - the top babyface - was hated by half the audience. That everybody you were told to invest in 11 months of the year would look at the lights for ancient favourites at WrestleMania. That Vince McMahon - and thus WWE - hated you so much that real life criticisms of the organisation were in fact a figment of your imagination and just part of the heat machine.
It was all nonsense, and 2014-2016 was the period Triple H categorically proved it behind nnnnnnnDadddd's back.
Talents that were under contract to WWE became the talk of the tastemakers for the first time since Vince McMahon bought his competition in 2001. NXT's weekly broadcast looked as much like a system as a show, but everybody loved it more as a result. The booking was simplistic but thoughtfully so, encouraging devoted audiences to love (or love hating) the talent so much that characters could simultaneously garner investment on NXT and generate support for them to eventually leave the show for Raw or SmackDown.
It's impossible to list every popular character and angle from a two year period of joyous creative, not least because it'd be easier to identify the performers that weren't over.
Trajectories were transparent, but never once felt repetitive because the gimmicks always got over and got on. The best of the bunch got featured on TakeOver specials that enhanced a meritocracy absent from other WWE shows for decades. And those shows got better, and better and better. Women's wrestling was as as good as it had ever been under a McMahon brand, and surpassed prior peaks with every passing match. Tag wrestling was reestablished as a crucial component, birthing several killer duos that existed to be tag teams rather than escape from them into a singles roles. Title reigns became sacred again, wrestlers became self-produced passion projects, and everything converged to become a product that, by 2015, was objectively a draw.
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