They have a pretty lucrative waffle and tire iron contract propping them up IIRC.

Yeah I believe a TV deal is the plan. Right now I think Corgan is just trying to prove they can put on an entertaining show and that there is an audience for it.

I wish YouTube was more sustainable because the hour show with no commercials (except their own fake ones) is perfect vs. trying to find it on some obscure cable channel.

I did forget about the Retromania wrestling game that is coming out!

The cool thing is that Retromania got the Wrestlefest rights off arc system works so it’s now an official sequel. Obviously it doesn’t have the WWF license but it’s got the road warriors as the final boss which makes it legit. Been following these devs since they were just posting prototype footage so it was really cool to see all these deals get announce.

Watched tonight's live since I was bored at work. Thought it was a big step up from last week and it really breezed by. Solid women's match setting up a latina heel stable, I liked the Aldis/Murdoch angle and Aldis continuing to be very subtly heelish (he left that hold on for the perfect amount of time), and Kamille is still very intriguing.

Unfortunately Cornette had a racist bit of commentary during the Murdoch match and is probably going to get booted off the show eventually since a bunch of AEW fans have an axe to grind with him for not liking "their" show. His commentary is perfect for this if he could just not do that.

11/19 episode live thoughts:

Nick Aldis is great, but that opening promo meandered and stumbled pretty hard. Good opening match with Trevor Murdoch though. The booking was fairly predictable, but the execution was strong. Did some good things for Murdoch without harming Aldis.

Yeah, Rock 'n Roll Express is immediately occupying much more of a spot than I hoped they would. Not at all interested in seeing them in a title match. Seems like their best use would just be to be fed to the Dawsons.

I feel about the Question Mark as Ben Wyatt feels about Lil Sebastian. I don't know why he's instantly so over. That said, I probably still prefer him to Ricky Starks by default, so I felt sort of relieved by the quick schmozz. The cliche of Colt jumping in to rescue his purported babyface rival is such an overplayed, lame segment; I was ready to compliment it when I thought maybe Colt would just let the beatdown happen.

Speaking of lame, overused cliches, after the jump we get the announcement of a holonaminutplaya tag match for the main event? Lovely.

Eli Drake calling Ken Anderson "past his sell-by date" almost felt like the type of shot he shouldn't take because it's too close to the bone. Still, I enjoyed the segment and took pleasure in the beatdown.

PPV promo. So, uhh, we're less than a month out; shouldn't we know at least one match on the card by now?

Incidentally, the minimalist approach to entrances is one that I like, but the ring announcer not even taking a beat when announcing the participants seems like a step too far in the minimalist direction.

Huh, the Melina appearance was a surprise. I see that she's 40 years old. I wonder if she can go at all these days; I at least remember her being able to do certain cool spots in WWE after she developed as a worker. Anyway, womens' tag match was very entertaining.

Was decidedly uninterested in the tag team main event. I kept waiting for a quick finish so that we could move on to a post-match segment that might cap the show better than the match could.

The James Storm/Kamille tease was at least something of a palate cleanser before the credits rolled.

Show had enough going for it that I would call it a solid episode - definitely an improvement on last week - but it was definitely weighed down by the Starks/Cabana/Question Mark/Stevens stuff.

I guess I missed the racist comment by Cornette, so I don't know how bad it was. In any case, I guess I'm failing to make the connection where AEW fans would have the needed power to get him pushed out of a niche company.

EDIT: Okay I've gone and done my research. It does suck that Cornette can't help but step in it. Also it appears that I must be selling the power of social media pressure on NWA short, given that they yanked the episode off of YT (presumably just until they can dub that line out).

If you listened to Jim Cornette's joke and think the use of "fried chicken" was the most offensive part of the joke then you should probably sit down and evaluate your privilege. That's not to say that one shouldn't be offended by him using fried chicken in his joke, but that's not the most offensive part of the joke. Not even close.

Apparently he's been fond of this joke for a bit.

I assumed it was a murdoch is fat but he's also athletic comment he was trying to make in real time.

Sure the remarks are stupid as hell but there are too many people who desperately want to say everything is racist and get offended. This one isn't that r word, sorry snowflakes on twitter.

edit--well he's an old guy from kentucky so I assume he is racist but I don't get that being the quote that gets him there. I don't get the context, is it simple as fried chicken is a known food of black people therefore it's racist to ever say it?

I seem to recall him making an Ethiopia joke before but I don't remember when. I've never seen the clip above.

The OJ joke is interesting. That is a little over a month into the case and I'm thinking most people (especially white people) presumed OJ's guilt at that point. The trial went on for another 7 months before he was declared not guilty.

I just don't see how anyone can think it is funny to joke about starving people. Certainly not when more than a million people died in a 2 year period. Ethiopia's population was a bit smaller than California's is today. Imagine California losing a mllion people, many of them children, to starvation. Imagine millions of Californians being displaced from their homes. Would anyone think that would be something that is ok to joke about?

oh that's the "joke" he was making, the famine. Yikes. Okay that's bad and why he used fried chicken. I apologize for my error of my previous post. I just thought he needed something that everyone would immediately get and that was one of the few things, welp.

Well the show is going for an old school wrestling program and 80's/early 90's are racist as all hell so...

I don't really think Cornette is racist, just a guy who likes offensive humor and seems unaware of what the current cultural boundaries are for such things. I think a lot of people hate him for his opinions on wrestling and are using this as a way to try to censor him. Don't want to defend what he said in any way but I'm skeptical of people's motivations about the whole thing.

Yeah, in a perfect world, outraged reactions would be exclusively expressed by actually outraged people. Faux-outrage, produced by people who aren't sincerely offended but feel like acting outraged is the thing to do, is garbage. If someone is legitimately outraged by this and has reacted accordingly then I have no quarrel with them.

It's a shitty thing that Cornette said and I'm fine with him being dragged for it, but I'd be lying if I claimed to be outraged when my real internal reaction is a more detached, "oh, yeah, that's a bad thing to say."

Halfway through. I keep going back to how Nick Aldis is a legit star and the rest of the roster completely sucks.

Trevor Murdoch? Colt Cabana? The 70 year old Rock & Roll Express?

Wrestling is supposed to have athletes. I get it's a staged story but the in-ring product is miles behind every federation out there. I feel like I could get off the couch, prep for 3 months, and be equivalent to 80% of their talent.

What is the demographic they are going for with this federation? Are they going for a national audience? Are they trying to get kids invested? 18-49? Older?

I have no idea and I don't think they know either.

About the last thing that it feels like NWA is guilty of is failing to understand what demo is likeliest to dig its product.

I would think/hope that Billy Corgan is well aware that this has a ceiling of being a successful niche product. Obviously it isn't taking over the world.

My point is who could possibly want to shell out $25 to see matches involving the Rock & Roll Express, Colt Cabana, Trevor Murdoch, Mr. Anderson, the Question Mark, and Aron Stevens?

Maybe I'll give Stevens a pass because of entertainment value but all of the other ones are we serious? These are guys totally washed up. How can anyone want to pay for piss poor washed up wrestling? It's like watching former tennis players in their 40s-50s who were ranked ~100 in the world.

I won't act like the guys you listed are amazing, but that's the bottom of the card. They're not the reasons people will be ordering a PPV; it'll be because of Aldis, Drake, both Storms, and the entire story-centric presentation.

We also just seem to have different ideas of what makes for good or bad wrestling. I think every Young Bucks match sucks and am at the point where I'd rather watch Murdoch slam a guy than see another super-athletic no-character guy do a suicide dive and flip onto people at ringside. The product is obviously geared towards similar fans who want a more slower-paced, story-influenced style of wrestling, which everyone they have can pull off just fine.

The episode is back up. I thought it was a great card. Much better than last week.

I was really thrown for a loop in the women's match when the announcer said Allysin Kay was "still undefeated in Mixed Martial Arts." I couldn't find any official record of her fights but apparently she had an MMA fight in a super small time promotion back in 2015 that she won.

I initially thought the announcer was talking about Thunder Rosa who has a multi-fight contract with Combate Americas. Thunder Rosa just had her MMA debut less than 2 weeks ago and unfortunately she was destroyed. The fight was not competitive whatsoever. I'm sure the thought was that she would take her opponent down to the ground but she was unable to execute on that and essentially ended up in a Muay Thai match vs an experienced Muay Thai striker that had height and reach advantages against her.

Both paragraphs are exactly how I feel. It was a disgusting line but I've unfortunately heard him say plenty of really bad things before so I was just like "ugh, Cornette."

The fact that this made it to air is solely not on Cornette though, this show was taped months ago and presumably edited a decent time before it was uploaded. I'm pretty sure Cornette didn't produce, direct or edit the show so there's plenty of other people that let this slide. On a show that is so heavily styled there's no way people missed it and might have even been by design.

I doubt they will over this but if they do boot Cornette, who could replace him and fit the style? JR is an obvious choice but he's also with AEW. Probably unpopular but I think Matt Striker has been great since leaving WWE and could possibly play the role. I can't really think of anyone else.

Said it before, but I plan to. More likely I just pay the early-bird rate of $20 by pre-ordering, but they need to give me some semblance of a card during the next couple of weeks before I'll pull the trigger. The total lack of a card less than a month out is odd.

For your tastes, I'm pretty sure this product is never going to get significantly better. I guess I'm surprised you made it past one episode.

Trevor Murdoch and The Question Mark each nearly cracked my top 5 wrestlers (across all promotions) yesterday. If you're not going to shell out money for these guys I don't know who you would actually pay to see.