Why NXT Requires A Total Rethink
Dave Meltzer, drawing on data compiled around the taped RAW Attitude Era business model, refutes the idea that a pro wrestling show must be broadcast live to entice viewers. The events of January 4, 1999 support this point hundreds of thousands of times over. But in this digital, super-served content age, in which events fall into the expanse instantaneously, a great match taped three weeks ago feels less great, less must-see, when great matches are performed weekly in countless promotions. The great version of NXT is in the upper echelon of those promotions, of course, but the experimental, amateur-driven undercard component drags it down from must-see to might-check-out-the-highlights.
Creatively, NXT remains the antithesis to the main roster. Every storyline makes sense. There are few, if any, plot holes. It’s textbook pro wrestling, and sometimes, about as dry as that reads.
It’s all a bit functional in 2018. A certain charm is missing, the charm that once compensated for a taped brand that never much relied on can’t-miss vitality. There’s no extemporaneous Blue Pants magic, nor inexplicable New Japan fly-ins, nor life-affirming career arcs forged by the Realest Guys In The Rooms in 2018. NXT used to be the place in which the people who weren’t supposed to make it, like the unmasked Sami Zayn and the white meat Bayley, made it. Now, NXT adopts a more calculated, risk-free approach, in which the people who have made it elsewhere are promoted in accordance with their popularity. That is no bad thing, clearly—Christ knows it answers the loudest complaint levelled at the main roster—but there’s too much of the bad NXT, and not quite enough of the other.
NXT hasn’t ran a wild angle in an age. It took an injury to Aleister Black to wake the brand from its formula and embark on a new, mysterious narrative path. Elsewhere, various tag teams no closer to the TakeOver stage engage in lengthy, stakes-free programmes, NXT is trying to make Kona Reeves happen (it’s not going to happen), and Sullivan is back at square one. An act like the Forgotten Sons is doomed. Steve Cutler, Jaxson Ryker and Wesley Blake are presented as also-rans in a fatalistic approach fatal to their prospects. The ‘Why aren’t we getting a push?’ gimmick is code for ‘You aren’t getting a push’.
Attempts to cover the NXT TV show on this very site, in the otherwise bankable Ups & Downs format, have consistently failed to take off. Bluntly, there is little appetite among even the most dedicated of wrestling fans for analysis of, say, a Bianca BelAir Vs. Nikki Cross main event, much less the viewing of it.
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