So, needless to say, early last year when The Elite went out there with modern day wrestling legend, Chris Jericho, who has reinvented himself through over two decades of the best and worst the business has seen, and they all announced they were creating their own federation back here in the States, I got extra hyped. New Japan Pro Wrestling is still hands down my favorite thing going in the business, but as much as I prefer emphasis of the athletic, in-ring action end of wrestling (which NJPW delivers in spades), I still want to see some nonsensical storylines play out and smack-talking promos be cut, which are things NJPW just skimp on. And I'm excited by this because, quite frankly, I still thought (and think) that week to week WWE programming - the only game in town for nationally televised pro wrestling for almost twenty years now - is as fundamentally devoid of creativity and proper booking as it was when it drove me away in the mid-00's. Anyway, so All Elite Wrestling is born via the combined efforts of Omega, Jericho, legacy wunderkind Cody Rhodes, tag team revolutionaries "The Young Bucks", and a guy who likes to do, as he says, "Cowboy Shit" in Adam Page, and needless to say, I'm hyped. This move prompts, predictably, Vince McMahon to say "fuck that, here's my giant wrinkly billionaire balls" and moves NXT, their supposed "farm league" brand of wrestling that is actually the best thing the company is doing because it emphasizes in-ring performance as much as it does out-ring hijinks, to the same Wednesday night slot as AEW's Dynamite show because, well, that's all his lizard brain knows how to operate when it comes to competition. "Seek and destroy" is his only answer to anything remotely threatening, but in due-part to that slapdash answer, we got one of the best things going for the wrestling business in over twenty years; honest to god exciting weekly wrestling featuring two companies that are actually feeding off each others' actions to perform better in their own regard.
And, to keep splurging for just a little bit, the past near-year since this rivalry kicked up has been at times euphoric for someone like me and my fan tastes. The action has been almost as good as the feats of freak athleticism that ECW was pumping out in the late 90's and that NJPW regularly puts on display currently and that really hooked me back in from 2017 to 2019. Legitimately, considering its happening on a weekly basis, the consistency in actual match performance I've been consuming every week for ten months now is pretty impressive. And a good bit of the storylines have been presented with good-to-great dramatic and/or comedic flare without going to the abysmal extremes of both that have induced more eye rolls than actual enjoyment over the years since the end of the "Attitude Era." But, as much as I appreciate the actual wrestling craftsmanship, as much as I've laughed out loud in years at some of the bits, social media tweets, YouTube clips, etc that have been skitted out for us, and as much as I genuinely feel that each week both companies and their performers are going out of their way to put on some wrestling clinics and give us something fresh, all that competitive energy that has created one of the best atmospheres for wrestling in decades is definitely covering some nagging weak spots in both companies' games that I feel like are going to be big detriments to the product before us if they aren't treated appropriately and soon enough. Such as:
The AEW Women's Division
I'm going to start with the lowest hanging fruit of both companies right now and, quite frankly, this one isn't even clinging onto the branch for the last signs of life, it's laying rotting on the ground. Sadly, it's been this way since almost day one of AEW's existence and had barely scratched and clawed its way to something semi-interesting a couple months back, before some choice injuries put a damper on that. But let's tackle one thing at a time, starting first with the glaring problem of the division: it very much from the beginning started with very little name power (at least stateside) and had to build the talent from the ground up. And there is talent there, for sure, don't get me wrong. I was there for the very first Dynamite (humble brag) and the crowning of Riho as the first Women's Champ over "The Native Beast" Nyla Rose and the two of them very much put on a banger match for the title, as well as having some really good rematch scenarios since. Hikaru Shida has also blossomed into a quality "working champion" who takes on all comers, Britt Baker has become one of the best over-the-top heel mic workers in the business, and the company has come to rely on "The Bad Girl" Penelope Ford, Big Swole, and currently on the shelf Kris Statlander to help fill out shows with solid performances.
Now, all that actually sounds not too shabby when you put it that way, except for the part where we're now just about a year into the life of AEW and it has taken this long to have barely a half dozen women holding down that division and even then half of them aren't really "there" yet. Like, Riho is a fantastic talent that was very much worthy of her being the inaugural champion given her showmanship and the excitement she generated as the "perpetual underdog" due to her stature, but even pre-Covid her attendance was sketchy at best and without her there regularly, her claim to fame literally was just "she's tiny and spunky." Britt Baker has been great on the mic and churning out pre-recorded skits every since her "Roll Model" ego trip heel turn several months back, but before she got injured with her leg injury she was still a very inconsistent ring worker that was having trouble keeping up with better performers. Kris Statlander is a freak athlete who was also having sketchy in-ring consistency and doesn't spend time talking as her schtick so the miscues hurt her more, Big Swole is also pretty raw on both ends of the mic and mat, and Penelope is a good worker who basically hasn't had any time to show a personality besides it. And none of this is really their fault because, quite frankly, AEW simply does not give their women any time to develop, which is a pretty fatal flaw when these performers were already fighting an uphill battle with lack of overall exposure when they got to a national stage with this company.
The lack of any semblance of dedicated airtime to these women has from the get go smothered it in its infancy, and near a year later it is still that way. Obviously, the pandemic threw this division into more of a panic than anything else the company is doing since it denied them international stars like Riho and Yuka Sakazaki, and the injuries to Statlander and Baker were as about as poor a timing as could happen for both given their upward trajectories and plans at the time of shelving, but still. The women are lucky to maybe get a match a week on Dynamite proper and, hell, they're barely used on AEW Dark anymore either, except for the usual "crush the jobbers" stuff that Dark has now become during the pandemic. The last two Dynamites, as of my finishing this off (August 5th and 12th), featured two women's matches that totaled about five minutes of in-ring time. Hell, to go even further about how insipid this lack of time for the women has been, the whole "reinvention" of Britt Baker has revolved around how perfect her heel mic work has been and even with her still showing up for Dynamites simply to talk shit while recovering, she gets maybe two minutes tops a show to do her thing. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD THEY'RE HAVING A TAG TOURNAMENT FOR THE WOMEN AND IT'S BEEN SHOVED ONTO AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT YOUTUBE UPLOAD!! The lack of time for this division and these women to build themselves isn't just negligent, it's insulting. How any of them are expected to develop a presence when they're barely even being used on the "squash show" to at least show a move repertoire is one thing, and now they maybe get five minutes a week on the main brand. This division isn't just having a "downturn" between the injuries and Covid, it's just a complete afterthought to how the company books their shows.
The NXT Tag Division
The Undisputed Era! Imperium! Breezango! Uhhh... Oney Lorcan and Danny Birch sometimes! I present to you, the NXT tag division and, whew, boy. While not completely flatlined like the AEW Women's division, the NXT tag division definitely has an EMT straddling it, furiously performing CPR on it like in a network hospital drama. This one has multiple factors and a couple of them aren't under NXT's control, but they are a factor in the Wednesday Night War (WNW), such as the fact that AEW has gone so above and beyond to make their tag division so red freaking hot they signed so much talent that their sixth best team in the rotation is as good as any top team NXT can assemble. But the real killer here - and this will be a common factor in a lot of the issues NXT has as an organization and is related to ratings, though not necessarily NXT's own viewership - is that NXT has been gutted by talent in the past year or so by the main roster in order to get any sort of momentum going as ratings for Raw and Smackdown (especially the former) have been teetering on the brink of disaster. The Street Profits, War Raiders aka the Viking Experience aka the Viking Raiders aka Vince McMahon's mind is as stable as the United States Postal Service, the (Best) Forgotten Sons. Just from the actual tag teams alone the looting has been real, and also talents like Ricochet and Matt Riddle, who were generating some exciting tag matches just by being paired with fellow high-performance superstars like Pete Dunne kept the NXT tag division at the least "afloat" the past couple years, if not downright exciting when you had a nice rotation of the UE, Vikings, Profits, and whatever NXT UK call overs were vying for the titles. Now there's basically two teams worth a spit battling it out over the titles and while the Imperium pairing of Fabian Aichner and Marcel Barthel actually hold them, even they feel like they're spinning their wheels because the whole existence of that faction revolves around what their leader and most beef slappingest wrestler in the world, Walter, is cooking up and achieving and he hasn't been a factor in anything since Covid hit and essentially folded NXT UK. The only reason I don't rate this division lower than the AEW Women's division is because at least what little is left of the roster that competes in these bouts is given a fifteen main event slot every fourth NXT broadcast to put on a four(ish) star match and remind you of how things used to be and could be again.
The AEW Singles Mid-Card
Okay, this one is going to be controversial and I already hear the fourteen people who occasional check this space out screaming "how can you say that, look how loaded the roster is with quality wrestlers!!!" And to that I say, yes, it is, but how many of them are really invested in any actual singles storylines that have momentum outside the World Title picture? Because here is the problem, since AEW is in a "ratings war" with NXT, they are very much running their studs, and the studs are a mainly in the tag division and therefore two or three tag matches a week are eating up air time. Cody is doing a great week-to-week exhibition for the TNT title with his Open Challenge, but that is both a) not leading to any long-term storytelling as so far pretty much all those matches have stemmed exactly from a "hey, I want a shot" setup and b) doesn't always feature signed AEW talent as half the matches have been an excuse to essentially call in Indy darlings to give them some airtime and see how the viewers and Twitterverse react. Not that I think either of those are a bad thing, far from it, but with airtime at a premium, those extra ten minutes a week that could set up another rivalry go to a match that happens, is enjoyable, and moves on as Cody deceptively teases going back to either a cocky heel or somehow manages to keep pulling off being a privileged face as the idea of a new Four Horseman forms around his machinations.
But, again, that leaves time sparse to get everyone else involved, and since AEW Dark has been relegated mostly to squash matches involving local talent. I'll say it once more, I think it's great that AEW is giving these folks paychecks and attention, but it leaves that actual signed talent out in the cold storytelling-wise. Right now, with so much going on in the tag division and Cody with the TNT title and even the five minutes the women get (and of which they definitely count toward the Mid-Card and, as I explained earlier, are getting the shaft) you have what left? Matt Hardy and Sammy Guevara have beef that is playing out two minutes at a time every other week, Orange Cassidy and Jericho are building to one last brawl at this year's All In, and there MAY be a Darby Allin/Brian Cage thing in the works but outside of Cage and Allin failing to dethrone Jon Moxley as champion in recent weeks, there has been no real time spent to develop anything toward that bout with a month left to do so. Lance Archer is running around killing people in the dressing area with no one else to focus on, Brodie Lee is going to get a TNT title match because he answered the open challenge and that's about it; he failed a World Title bid and then spent the last two months hitting people with papers on Being the Elite. And, to be fair (to be faaaaaaair) one of the best things about AEW right now, hell, in all of wrestling, is the Hangman Page and Kenny Omega saga which, as good as it is, is taking away two prime singles competitors that could be building other storylines to attempt to dethrone Cody or Moxley and then build even more singles storylines down the line. The talent is there, no doubt, but the time isn't there because AEW's focus on the tag team situations across something like eight premiere tag teams is soaking up precious minutes.
The NXT World Title Picture
This, I feel, is a combination of some of the things I've mentioned above for both companies and also may be kind of controversial, but I don't really think so for reasons I'm going to break down. The first thing is that, again, this "Ratings War" has led to both companies running their studs, and right now the biggest upside that NXT has are its Women's Division and it actually has an exemplary singles mid-card, as they have invested a lot of time into talent acquisitions that they then run into each other and also against veterans that aren't in the main event picture at the moment. The NXT North American Championship is one of the most contested singles titles in the business right now because you not only have intriguing "build" talents like Damian Priest, Cameron Grimes, Dominic Dijakovic, Dexter Lumis, etc vying for it, but also names like Johnny Gargano and Finn Balor want that gold for some decent reasonings but also mainly because they're just not in the world title picture right now and the folks that run NXT realize you just leverage names not in the world title picture in mid-card rivalries, which AEW isn't doing. The downside to all this is that even though NXT is doing a lot of "building" they don't have a lot built yet, which compounds the other problem the big belt picture has, which is that, like the tag division at NXT, the main roster call up and the drain it put on talent the past year and a half or so, really left NXT devoid of those that they had already built.
Andrade and Aleister Black were already at the top of the game when they were pulled up early 2019 but at least it wasn't as devastating then because you had Gargano, Tommaso Ciampa, and Adam Cole and all their already built storylines ready to go. But on top of them you had guys like Ricochet and Matt Riddle who could have easily been next in line for pushes into that spotlight yoinked away and crumpling the foundations built with the skills and talents of those gentlemen. With such a large drain of talent upwards and NXT still very much building people in the middle still, you're left with a main event picture that rally is basically Adam Cole - who the title needs time away from to kind of "refresh" itself due to the length of his rein - Tommaso Ciampa, champion Keith Lee, and now Karrion Kross who, quite frankly, has had himself some interesting segments (a lot of which run through wife/valet Scarlett more than Kross himself) but has been kind of generic in the ring ever since he got the rocket pack slapped on him to be in this picture. Also, home grown talent Velvetine Dream continues to be both green in some mic and in-ring performances and may also be a pedophile with many accusations filed against him.
So you have a division that maybe, MAYBE at best has five people that feel right in being in the forefront of a well-built World Title run as champ or challenger. One of these guys (Cole) has just run so long with it it would be excessive to move him back into the picture any time in the next several months, next is a guy with a serious neck surgery under his belt (Ciampa) and that hasn't even been on TV in several weeks, and then you have a guy in Kross who everyone knows is destined to basically win the title, have a photo op with it, and then be moved up to the main roster because he's the kind of wrestler Vince McMahon pops his top off to with a valet/manager that he pops something else off to even more. Considering how great this World Title picture was for the better part of the past several years with some of the most exciting names in the business, having this cloud of, let's call it indifference, somewhat enveloping it despite one of the most enjoyable human beings on Earth in the form of Keith Lee holding it seems like there's a call for concern. Oh, and also, like half those names I mentioned as being "developing mid-carders" are actually ring vets that are in their mid-thirties and may just never have a top contender/champion run; they may just be running out the last few years of their careers as mid-card rank and file, leaving no real talent to fill the void at the top.
Aaaand those are definitely my top points to be made in all of this but I do think there are a couple other items to address that I'll kind of bullet point here, such as:
Rhea Ripley. While her World Title push probably came a little early given how rough around the edges she still is in a couple aspects of the wrestling game, she still has all the talent in the world to develop and was done dirty while she had the title during her first reign earlier this year. Instead of being given the chance to try and thrive under the spotlight, she had her rein cut off at the knees because it was obvious the people running things wanted a cheap ratings bump and what screams that better than just slapping the belt on someone like Charlotte Flair who dethroned Ripley? And now Ripley is kind of stuck in women's mid-card limbo while Io Shira (who, admittedly, is debatably the best women's wrestler on the planet) runs with the title and it's easy to see that Ripley will be floundering about for months before she's back in that ring vying for the belt again.
Joey Janella - Where's Joey?!?!? I don't know if he's on the outs with AEW but the sheer nonexistence of Joey anywhere, even after him and Sonny Kiss started showing some real good chemistry together in the overcrowded tag division, kind of goes to my greater point that there's just no real room for anyone to get Dynamite time if they're not one of the top six tag teams at the moment or challenging Cody. But this one is especially glaring because of how much face time the "Bad Boy" had with AEW in the early stages of its development as a company.
The WWE/NXT Cruiserweight Title - This title was already kind of iffy as to how much anyone cared about it once it essentially defaulted to NXT's purview several months ago, but then its fate was kind of sealed when Lio Rush up and left the wrestling business, Angel Garza was called up to the main roster, and a tournament was held for the belt when Jordan Devlin vacated it and then pretty much none of those people have been seen again on TV outside of champion Santos Escobar occasionally doing some weird kidnapping shit with his cronies and Drake Maverick spittling at the mic about the whole situation in their feud. But no one cares. The wrestlers who showed up for the tourney maybe pop in on NXT programming once every third week for a six minute match that fails to showcase their talents properly. Freaking Kushida is probably the best Junior-weight to grace the ring over the past fifteen years and he hasn't been on TV in a month. It's just all a waste of endless 4-star matches that could be being had on television amongst them all.
The AEW Ranking System - It's great that they do still use this intracompany metric as a way to establish who gets runs at the belts and so on and so forth, but to go with my long complaint about the singles mid-card of the show being kind of non-existent, what do these rankings mean when someone is, say, 8-0 because they beat a bunch of jobbers on Dark and then go lose to Cody? But then you have a like Darby Allin who is 3-4 but taking loses to guys like Moxley? There can't be any real weight to these ranks because no one is getting wins and losses to other quality talent. I'd be more impressed with someone who is 5-4 and their loses are to Cage, Brodie, etc and they have wins over a, say, Rey Fenix, Scorpio Sky, Allin combo than someone who racked up near double digits wins on Dark to get an easy "justified by their record" match against Cody some random Wednesday night.
I'll cut this off here because this is already a monstrous amount of wrestling talk, but there's probably a couple storytelling bits on both shows I could identify and performers I could pick at being slipped through the cracks, but yeah. Again, it's just a matter of time being precious and you having to use the best you got to fill time and hit the ratings, but not leveraging other resources to their detriment. Like, AEW could easily have an amazing mid-card singles presentation with the plethora of names on their roster, but no one there is doing anything to set up something against each other because all but about ten minutes a show is going to tag teams, world title stuff, and a Cody held belt that currently is not designed to set up rivalries. That last ten minutes is maybe enough to get a something like Jericho vs. Orange Cassidy going and, hell, that's also been more a main event deal. And NXT is always going to be hamstrung by the bigger shows being mismanaged until someone puts a foot down and lets talent stay on Wednesday to flourish instead of being called up just to be forgotten a couple months later. Resource management is key and both companies, while doing amazing stuff with what they do have at their disposal each week, are definitely still botching some usage of it. Regardless, Wednesday nights for wrestling today have been some of the best aspects of a wrestling watching habit I developed twenty-five years ago and then kicked for a long time because the highs just weren't there anymore. But now they're back and feel just as good as they ever did, you just hate to see this "renaissance" happening but quality talent getting squandered while the scene is as good as it has ever been.
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