idr what WWE was doing tonight but they were never scheduled to have a real show on Christmas or New Years.

So is AEW any good? I haven’t had cable in years but I’m in a hotel and there were like 30 ads for it. Making it look decently entertaining as well

It's alright. It has some positive things and some negative ones and what you're into/sick of wrestling wise will determine if you like it.

The positives for me:

- Tag team action is given a lot of feature. They aren't just random pairings having matches for the sake of killing time like WWE and they have more than two teams actively doing things at once.

- Stables are a thing similar to NJPW. In WWE you might have a stable but it's usually just one stable at a time running amok for a storyline and limited to 3-4 people. In AEW, stables are more just like a group of people that work together. There's the Inner Circle, the Elite, and the Dark Order and they can have a lot of members.


The negatives for me:

- They are banking on 90s nostalgia. The champion is 50 year old Chris Jericho. JR and Schiavone are the announcers and they are pretty yikes. JR, much like his time doing NJPW, doesn't even learn peoples names for the show. He repeatedly called one person the wrong thing all match and spent another section repeatedly asking who was in the ring because he didn't know who they were. Their production looks like late 90s WCW. It's a big turn off for me because I've been over the "remember when wrestling was popular!?" nostalgia stuff for a long time and I've been over the "super old guy that you remember from the 90s is champion" even longer. Jericho worked at midcard champion and henchman to the actual champion but he just doesn't do it for me as THE GUY. Especially when you watch the matches and he's slow, out of shape, and gassed.

- The roster is thin and a significant section of it shouldn't be on weekly tv. The last title match was Jericho vs Jungle Boy, which lets you know how thin the roster is. They finished the match with Cody and are eventually going to go to pac/ambrose/omega but they have nothing believable after that. Their episode a couple weeks ago got a lot of focus on this as the guys doing a beat down angle just looked horrible with their punches making shane o mac look like iron mike.

- Their booking is pretty rough. Metlzer referred to it as "00s wcw esque" a few weeks ago.



My suggestion: find a stream one night and just watch it and see what you think.

Cool, thanks for that breakdown. One of the commercials described it as “for wrestlers and by wrestlers” so was hoping it would be NXTesque

I haven’t been into wrestling in a while and doesn’t sound like it’d change my mind. Just nice to see a little hype for something on tv

Yeah overall AEW has been a little disappointing since going to weekly TV. The biggest issue, as mentioned, is the roster depth. It gets thin in a hurry.

AEW is literally the only interesting wrestling show on TV.

You're not a wrestling fan if you can say that after the 3 days NJPW just had.

To be fair, NJPW isn't exactly on mainstream US TV.

NJPW isn't even on AXS anymore.

What channel is NJPW on, Telemundo?!?

2020 and you still care about network TV... OK boomer.

TV is where the money is at for live "sporting" events these days. I'm not a boomer though you bigot.

The "J" in NJPW stands for Japan which is an actual country with it's own culture separate to the US. I also don't live in the US so what's on TV there means nothing to me. I care about the quality of a show, not how much money it makes. It's a big world out there, US network TV is clearly not needed to create a decent wrestling show as showcased by NJPW, NWA, Rev Pro etc.

lol...

ok boomer

Another great show by AEW this week. Top to bottom just a great show. So glad we have this now instead of the same boring crap WWE produces.

You mean stuff like The Nightmare Collective thing last night, an old guy coming back (DDP), The Dark Order, and the Jericho/Moxley ending that wouldn't be out of place on a WWE show....

You won't be surprised who that post ended up being by

Entire paragraph remains accurate months later.

As far as NXT critiques go, I think the Worlds Collide concept sucks -- it's Survivor Series without big stars and there's no heat. I've watched a bit of NXT UK and while the women's division is great, the men outside of Walter and Bate are vanilla workrate guys with no charisma. I almost fell asleep during the Undisputed Era/random British guys match and I wasn't even tired. I wasn't too surprised to see AEW beat them in ratings even though I'm not a huge fan of a lot of that show.

Any sort of "brand supremacy" concept that has people that hate each other working together always falls flat to me. This is no different.

I'm surprised anyone is still watching NXT. Well, I suppose not many are considering NXT finished 55th in the nightly cable ratings vs 6th for AEW. People watching NXT are like WCW fans circa 1999. Somehow they still haven't received the memo that the opposing wrestling program is far more entertaining.

WWE is more style over substance. When they bring a legend back it's just for the name recognition and maybe a fancy entrance and that's it. Undertaker is a great example. The dude brings absolutely nothing to the table other than a fancy entrance. I'm sure WWE is praying for the day they can replace him with the next generation's Undertaker. God knows Baron Corbin is capable of walking to the ring and pinning someone.

Goldberg is even worse than Undertaker. Terrible on the mic. Terrible in the ring. A big fat nothing other than a name. Batista is another dude WWE brought back and he wasn't even that old but he was just terrible but they brought him in because he has a big name.

DDP doesn't have a big name like those guys. However, what he can do that none of those other guys can do is work. He cut one hell of a promo last night and he's still in phenomenal condition with the ability to perform the little that is asked of him which is certainly more than the other guys I mentioned are able to do.

Nothing was worse than the Rhodes brothers over Lucha Bros with 50 year old Dustin Rhodes pinning Rey Fenix clean. Inexcusable.

Undertaker vs Goldberg headlining a PPV isn't more inexcusable than a guy that is still physically capable of working pinning a guy with an 8-6 record? LoL WWE fans. Come back to reality.

I still like NXT, and think the women's division right now is the best it's ever been.

Lol this comparison

AEW has been renewed through 2023 and they are going to start airing a 2nd AEW show as well. 2 nights of AEW every week! Between AEW and NWA this is as much wrestling content as anyone could ever want!