sek69

In a perfect world I'd like to see both WWE and AEW succeed, since the biggest the wrestling business ever grew was when there were two major companies constantly tweaking each other to get better. A world where AEW was the big dog and WWE was out of business or at Impact levels of insignificance would suck just as much as the WWE dominated landscape we have now (probably in a different way but it would still be bad).

There's also a weird psychological effect of WWE being the only wrestling a lot of people have ever known (for better or worse), so having a company come in to challenge them feels like a threat to those folks and/or an attack on their childhood. I've said it before, but there is a larger amount of folks out there who are wrestling fans that are not WWE fans. No one has ever really tried to tap into that market since WCW died, every attempt to be a major player has gone the route of trying to be Diet WWE, and if people want to see that style they'll watch WWE do it better. That's why the "workrate promotions" end up being the ones that get a lot of buzz on the indies, they offer something different than you see in WWE. It's why NXT got all it's initial buzz, it was offering something different. You can make an argument that AEW is trying too much to be a jack of all trades, and I wouldn't necessarily disagree with that. However the fact that they're even attempting to cater to different tastes seem to be winning over fans in a way that WWE's "we have one style and you'll like it" approach has failed to.

They will probably joke about it on BTE since the gimmick there is that the Young Bucks are terrible executives who sign bad contracts, but I doubt they would ever actually bring them in. Maybe Cass since he's seemed to have done a babyface turn by opening up about his battles with mental health, but Enzo is the wrestling equivalent to the bottom of a Chernobyl reactor. Since they are basically a package deal, I would expect AEW to pass on them.

I'd like to say "little of column A, little of column B", but I'm sure the writers aren't the only one left scrambling with Vince's whims changing on a dime. When given proper time WWE production can be amazingly well done, but I'm not sure if even an Academy Award winning cinematographer/director/camera operator combo can work magic when told "do something in an hour that our crazy ass boss might decide to throw out seconds after we finish".

This seems like the logical answer. Once I heard their Impact deal was up, I was assuming AEW is where they would land. Vince already has his "urban tag team" quota filled with the Street Profits and the Usos.

I can get Alexa having a big, over-designed heel plan to have all three of them attack Becky, the only problem is Becky came off as a heel and a major asshole in the earlier segment attacking Nattie (and Fit) for no reason. It made what should have been a heel beatdown into something more like a babyface getting her revenge.

Marko Stunt signed with AEW, he could be good as their version of Spike Dudley. If all we get out of it is him on Jungle Boy's shoulders while Jungle Boy is on Luchasaurus's shoulders as an entrance it would all be worth it.

I never thought of it like that since Orton is on cruise control so much these days, but damn is it spot on. Makes me wonder how great he would be in an environment where he'd feel the need to give a shit more than once or twice a year.

Brother, that take is cooling off faster than a bag of McDonald's fries. It's amazing to see another guy that checks all the typical Vince boxes get used as cannon fodder.

If you actually call/email support (rather than @ the twitter support account) they say the Hidden Gems content is supposed to be added back on eventually.

Wasn't Ryan Ward the one running the SD team now? Guess Vince has to bury all the NXT callups he gets.

Reports are out that Vince has demanded another day-of-the-show rewrite of Smackdown, two weeks in a row now. Doesn't look like their end of the new creative reorganization is working out too well.

Maryse is pregnant too, maybe she can win it on an episode of Miz and Mrs.

The very first Raw after Vince tried to bury AEW with advertisers by calling it "blood and guts" stuff, they do an angle with one of their top guys bleeding from his guts, lol. There was an obvious effort to build folks up, so that was a welcome change.

So apparently Anthem had a big plan to buy the AXS channel and putting Impact on the Pursuit channel was just a stop gap until the deal went through, since there was no point signing a TV deal with another network for such a short period of time. Well, the AXS deal fell through and now it looks like Impact is stuck relying to Twitch and a channel no one gets for the foreseeable future.

Also last we saw Renee Michelle she was being driven off in a limo with R-Truth, and Drake was imagining what horrors awaited the 24/7 title (and also his wife). Now she's just back in a mixed tag.

I wonder if the Usos will end up with another title win after an arrest.

Briscoes vs Rush/Dragon Lee was a fun blood filled brawl on this week's show. Considering the Briscoes did the job here but ended up winning the tag titles back from G.O.D., this could be a real money program for ROH that they desperately need.

Karen Q broke her leg on a house show the other night.

Apparently Finn got leveled by stomach flu and Ali was a last minute sub, probably explains why that match wasn't super crisp.

That gimmick is so unremarkable it took me several minutes to realize I got the name of the team wrong.

I think it's two separate issues: the Librarians are supposed to be a spoof on bad gimmicks and they don't really do enough during the actual shows to emphasize that to people who don't follow the YouTube stuff. It comes off tryhard and people who "know" the joke end up mad at the people who don't. The New Order on the other hand was supposed to be a serious heel group and it just didn't land, but because of things like the Librarian it creates a somewhat inaccurate impression of AEW being the land of bad gimmicks.

Jericho seems to be smart enough to keep his drunken adventures to Twitter at least. Plus between his wrestling and music gigs I would assume he probably has a bus or some other method of transportation where he doesn't drive himself. But if he got busted for DUI and they did a joke about it on TV it would be just as much bullshit. No such thing as alcohol rehab? You can probably make an argument if it's effective (I personally don't think anyone can get clean unless they deal with the underlying issues that cause them to use in the first place), but it definitely exists. Also since most states are "at-will" when it comes to employment, you can get fired for anything that isn't codified in the law (race/gender/religion/etc). WWE was known to fire people the second they sniff any possible bad PR, the only reason they don't do it now is because they are deathly afraid of handing AEW their next big star.

That surprised me how that kind of flew under the radar. Everyone was expecting the Usos to get buried under the arena floor after news of that arrest broke, but they ended up more or less being rewarded by winning the titles (as much as winning tag titles can be seen as a reward in 2019 WWE). Everyone's reaction was more or less "huh, didn't expect that" and the world moved on.

So I got the update on my phone and tablet so far, and it's different for sure. Searching seems improved, not sure if the new categories are a mess or my brain is still looking for the older ones, so I suppose I'll give it some time to adjust.