AEW TV 11/22 - 11/25 the CC begins!

[Jmare007]

TK booked a CC that will lead to a Triple Crown winner. I guess he's trying to compensate to Baba after all the Inoki love he's done in the past few months?

Any way, the tourney matches for this week:

Tonight on Dynamite:
Jay White vs. Rush
Jay Lethal vs. Swerve Strickland
Jon Moxley vs. Mark Briscoe

On Collision:
Daniel Garcia vs. Claudio Castagnoli
Eddie Kingston vs. Brody King

Danielson gets the week off to keep healing as much as possible I guess (he still gotta work twice in a week eventually and risk it all though )

 

White vs Rush and Eddie vs Brody look like potentially great fucking matches.

[WingedEagle]

It is 2023. Samoa Joe has been retired once, written off more than that and yet here he is as the #1 heel bringing stability to and anchoring a world title program. The Champ Is Here, indeed.

[Matt D]

1 hour ago, WingedEagle said:

It is 2023. Samoa Joe has been retired once, written off more than that and yet here he is as the #1 heel bringing stability to and anchoring a world title program. The Champ Is Here, indeed.

It’d be fun to go back to Day 1 AEW and tell people Joe and Christian would be the top heels.

[Timbo Slice]

Man, that crowd was weird tonight. Chicago been wrung out as an AEW market but this was just weird. 
 

Still don’t get the Moxley/Briscoe psychology down the stretch, Moxley has this really strange energy in matches like that and I can never find my footing with it. 
 

Samoa Joe is the absolute best. That is all. 

[Johnny Sorrow]

The creepy WOOO Energy drink logo with cartoon Flair on the screens as the show started and then stuck around made me laugh so hard I turned off the show as Swerve and Lethal had a dumb, bad match that made no sense. And I'd love to see them in a match that made sense.

[strobogo]

Doing a G1

Shibata has said he would commit full time to AEW if Tony asks

Brings in Shibata on the show where the G1 starts

It's to work Trent and Wheeler Yuta

:killme

[El-P]

The WOO Energy Drink is grotesque and all, but the good thing is that you don't see the Draft King logo which was equally as gross (I mean, online betting and all, it actually always never sit well with me that while I paid for a PPV, I still got fucking online betting commercials)

The G1 stuff is cool and all. It really is. And I like the Blocks. 

Samoa Joe getting a main event World title match PPV spot is awesome. I'm not into the wholesome "you deserve it" kinda stuff, but if one guy deserves it, that's Joe. He's been nothing short of awesome during his entire AEW run and at this point, I say put the belt on him. Have him or Cole be the Devil and fuck MJF around in his hometown. Nassau Coliseum sucks anyway. But honestly I don't have much trust in how this Devil thingy is gonna end.

But now... that Christian/Luchasaurus/Nick Wayne's Mom/Copeland segment. This is WWE. WWE won. They just did. It's impossible to not do WWE when you do pro-wrestling in the US, apparently. And it sucks. This segment, despite however "well" it was executed, reeked of everything I can't stand about WWE's vision of pro-wrestling. Cheap TV drama bullshit that goes back to Russoesque writing with nonsensical twists and turns (why is Luchasaurus even considering maiming Nick Wayne's Mom seconds only after he stood up for her ? Why is babyface Adam Copeland hurting Nick Wayne on purpose in front of his own mother when Nick really did nothing to him ?). Stuff like this really makes me want to throw the towel, awesome pro-wrestling *matches* notwithstanding. This is the kinda stuff I would have made fun off endlessly if I had watched it during my old TNA watch. And it's not even badly executed enough to be entertaining to me in a car crash kinda way. Apart from Copeland's goofy-ass facials (damn, he's really THAT ridiculous), they pretty much all did a good job with it, including Nick Wayne's Mom (whom btw, respectfully and all, how old is she anyway ? She seems way young to have a 21 years old kid.). But still, I feel like I'm watching RAW or Smackdown. Yeah, it's sad that apparently it's impossible to think out of the WWE box for too long. Pro-wrestling is such a conservative, conformist and unimaginative little world... 

[sek69]

It's going to get overshadowed by Survivor Series fallout, but Rampage and Collision were fun watches tonight. Eddie Kingston in TV main events is good for the soul. 

[Mr Wrestling 2000]

Top Flight is back next week!

[Blehschmidt]

After that match last night, if they let Gravity on television again, they are out of there minds. 

[NintendoLogic]

TK has clearly learned nothing and continues to exert as much authority over the locker room as a substitute homeroom teacher.

[El-P]

*facepalm*

One big mistake Coach TK made was signing all those ex-WWE people that did not want to be anywhere else. Of course, he probably did not know in advance what he was getting (Swerve & Claudio have been huge plus thus far, Miro & Malakai, not so much). If there's a good reason not to push Malakai Black more than he is/was, well, this kind of stuff is why. And yes, it's completely idiotic to let the AEW talent refer to Punk, like MJF did on Dynamite. Unless of course some drama occurs over there with Punk (which probably won't happen....uh ?), in which case I guess it's only fair game. But you can only punch up when you're really the cool product with the hype, which AEW is not right now and hasn't been in a while.

[Ricky Jackson]

It's fascinating for me as someone only following this from a distance how history has kinda repeated itself with a cool company and a cold WWE(F) turning into a cold company (with a bunch of backstage drama) and cool WWE over the course of a year or so. AEW is still much more stable than WCW, it seems anyway

[El-P]

52 minutes ago, Ricky Jackson said:

 AEW is still much more stable than WCW, it seems anyway

With the added PPV revenues, the new TV show (which very ironically was created for CM Punk to have it's own safe place), the success of All In, 2023 is actually the best year for AEW business wise yet, despite the fact ratings aren't that great (Dynamite is doing really good, the other shows not so good) and the live audience have been struggling. TK got White and Ospreay, whom the WWE wanted, and re-signed the Elite, whom WWE also wanted. It's not like they are not putting a good fight. To me it's just kinda disheartning that they are veering more and more toward a WWE-lite product, at least one part of their product does, which really doesn't appeal to me at all and is totally the opposite of what it was built on.

Actually, the end of Being The Elite really underlines this death of the original spirit of AEW too, the chronology of which you can really trace down to the formation of the Elite in NJPW, them going to ROH, to the Bucks becoming legit stars through the means of a Youtube channel (complete with selling shitloads of merchandise), making All In a reality, leading up to the creation of AEW. In a way, this era really closes at the end of 2021 when Hangman Page finally defeats Kenny Omega, with the Bucks playing a role by not interfering. After that point, AEW became the home of CM Punkmania, CM Punkdrama, ex-WWE guys wanting to go back and a more WWE-lite part of the product with the MJF/Adam Cole angle and Wembley main event (and overcooked and overbooked angle at the last PPV) and the Adam Copeland stuff. This era of the mid-late 10's up to 2021 is when pro-wrestling become fun and exciting to me again. The past two years, not as much.

[Jmare007]

Being The Elite lasted more than 7 years, that's an eternity in wrestling. I think the bigger issue is how the Buck's impact in the products is basically zero. Their matches lose viewers every time, they are not huge merch movers anymore and they make no difference moving tickets (like 95% of the roster). Right now their only real asset is being friends with Kenny and keeping them meant keeping Omega.

[El-P]

Which is probably why they are going off for a while and coming back fresher. But like I said, the Elite has been the most exciting thing in pro-wrestling from 2016 to 2021 and they did change the landscape (and strictly on a personal level, made me evolve a whole lot as a pro-wrestling fan). But they did peak. And with them, so did AEW. And so did my personal interest in the current scene. I mean, I struggle to go through the weekly TV now, despite the regular great matches and tons of workers I do enjoy a lot. No idea if I'm keeping up with it next year. Probably what they do at World's End will play a part. Then again, maybe I'll just be happy to browse through it after the fact in some time, with no care for news, ratings and dramas (with the benefit of hindsight too).

[The Man in Blak]

22 hours ago, El-P said:

One big mistake Coach TK made was signing all those ex-WWE people that did not want to be anywhere else.

Like Cody, Jericho and Moxley? Or do you mean Danielson, Christian and Samoa Joe?

AEW has always featured ex-WWE people -- given that WWE was effectively the only act in town on a broader national level for almost two decades after WCW went under, it's almost impossible to find a big name that hasn't had a run in the WWE.

[El-P]

19 minutes ago, The Man in Blak said:

Like Cody, Jericho and Moxley? Or do you mean Danielson, Christian and Samoa Joe?

None of those names fit the "that did not want to be anywhere else." part. Which is the most important part.

[The Man in Blak]

16 minutes ago, El-P said:

None of those names fit the "that did not want to be anywhere else." part. Which is the most important part.

Sure, which is why Cody is one of the top babyfaces in WWE now - he didn't really want to go, they just pulled him back in like Al Pacino in Godfather 3, the poor guy.

My ultimate objection with all of this being laid at the feet of the "ex-WWE guys" is that it carries this implicit assertion that TK and the Elite don't really have any responsibility for any of this; they cannot fail, they can only be failed by others. The promotion is named after the Elite, they're all EVPs, but they're mysteriously being taken for a ride by some dark, nebulous force that's dragging them into the mud of WWE melodrama, even though the end of the Page/Omega title match (perfect as it was) was tied to that methodology as much as anything else that's being done in the company today. I'm as eager to see an alternative as anybody else, but not so much that I'm willing to forego criticism of the people allegedly in power.

[El-P]

34 minutes ago, The Man in Blak said:

Sure, which is why Cody is one of the top babyfaces in WWE now - he didn't really want to go

I'm talking about guys like Miro, Andrade, Malakai, Mathews, who were fired during the pandemic and obviously have only one thing in mind, going back to the E because it's the big league to them (although Miro may have changed his tune lately with CJ signing too). And really, guys like CM Punk, who obviously had no respect for what was built with AEW. Cody's case is very different. Tons of others like Mox, Danielson, Joe (and Jericho, for obvious reasons) have obviously been nothing but positive.

34 minutes ago, The Man in Blak said:

My ultimate objection with all of this being laid at the feet of the "ex-WWE guys" is that it carries this implicit assertion that TK and the Elite don't really have any responsibility for any of this

Considering I've been shitting on TK's many bad decisions as far as booking (a more WWE-lite product in many ways) and signings (Flair, yuck, Copeland, yawn) go for a while now, no, there's no implicit assertion from me at all. 

Also, Collision this week-end looked like AEW had a very much late-WCW moment, with botch galore and production fuck-ups, which makes them look even worse when all the hype is about Punk going back to the E (which is absolutely hilarious for so many reasons, but still). 

[KawadaSmile]

Andrade certainly wants out, but if there is one person I think absolutely wants to stay at AEW is Miro. Basically he wasn't included in the C1 tournament because he'd need to job, is still getting paid regardless, and managed to get his hot and flexible wife on the pay roll. He essentially figured out the game to a level which would make Kevin Nash shed a tear.

[El-P]

Gotta say this though. I've been at best indifferent, at worst negative about the Copeland stuff thus far, but that promo he cut on Collision was fire. FWIW, booking a very much WWE-lored match in Montreal is a good idea, since the audience is gonna be pretty much a WWE audience anyway. 

[NintendoLogic]

When it rains, it pours.

Was it from the elbow drop at Full Gear? Even if it wasn't, that was in all likelihood the dumbest bump in history. Even dumber than Joe's dropkick on the steps.

[El-P]

Put the title on Joe, then pass it to Swerve.

2023 was snakebit.

[C.S.]

On 11/24/2023 at 6:39 AM, El-P said:

Nick Wayne's Mom (whom btw, respectfully and all, how old is she anyway ? She seems way young to have a 21 years old kid.)

Not sure if this makes much if a difference in your mind, but Nick Wayne is 18.