Why AEW Were Right All Along
The slow-mo "comedy" vignettes, the TNA aesthetic trappings of the Devil, the Ole Anderson modulated voice of the Devil, the Devil hacking the broadcast feed complete with a light show that was just begging for Y'all Ready For This? from Space Jam to be played over the top of it: AEW didn't "feel" like AEW for a while there.
The Devil storyline was poor, but it wasn't the limit to AEW's problems. Something has felt off since Brawl Out even when AEW smashed the lingering, greyed cloud with excellent pay-per-views. Tony Khan also made the same mistakes virtually every one of his predecessors did. He introduced too many titles, undermining the very notion of achievement. Bad, tropey booking habits filtered through; the sheer level of interference that polluted the show reached a nadir of parody by Double Or Nothing, a show on which over half of the matches were blighted by outside activity. Much of it felt meaningless - and redundant, since Karen Jarrett had them all licked at drawing heat.
He signed too many wrestlers, filling a quagmire as much as a talent roster, from which it was difficult to escape. With so many great wrestlers in one promotion, Khan was bound to fail at least one of them. He failed several. The quagmire was deep. A lot sunk into it. Great talent, as a result of the wonky roster: TV time ratio, was often left to languish, and that Khan, an impulsive fella, quite liked throwing Gravity or Timothy Thatcher or even the worst ex-NXT wrestlers you've ever seen on his show did not help. Konosuke Takeashita, a phenomenal pro wrestler, barely wrestled in the back half of 2023 - even after defeating Kenny Omega twice in the space of a week.
The problems were exponential. Messes become more messy if they aren't cleaned up; that's what they do. If Take defeating Omega meant nothing, those supposed huge game-changing wins, what did that, in turn, say about Omega? He couldn't have been that big a star, a scalp, if defeating him cleanly didn't propel Takeshita further up the card. Just as they didn't in WWE in 2019 - the Hades-low bar AEW soared above - wins and losses increasingly meant little in AEW four years later. The programme, which lasted months, might as well have not happened.
CONT'D...(2 of 5)