I’m a pro wrestling fan, as I believe I’ve mentioned a time or two before. And,
specifically, I’m a fan of All-Elite Wrestling, a promotion that started in 2019 and currently airs
two weekly TV shows, AEW Dynamite on Wednesday nights on TBS, and AEW Rampage on Friday nights
on TNT — that’s here in the U.S., of course — international viewers, check your local listings.
There’s a lot about AEW that I really like. Some of my favorite wrestlers work there, including
Jon Moxley, Eddie Kingston, Hikaru Shida, the tag team FTR, CM Punk and Bryan Danielson, who joined
the company last year, and until recently Cody Rhodes — so long, Cody! Unless it’s a work . . .
But, there are also things about AEW that I don’t like. With a few notable exceptions,
its long-term storytelling has not been great. It’s done a poor job at consistently
showcasing non-white wrestlers and women on its roster — I did a whole video about that
a little while back. Too often its matches are what smart-ass online fans like me refer to
as “spot fests,” which means they’re a series of impressive-looking moves without enough psychology
to tie them together into a cohesive story. And, the company has developed an unfortunate reliance
on bloody hardcore matches, where wrestlers take turns attacking each other with increasingly
vicious weapons, including barbed wire, thumbtacks, and fluorescent light tubes.
There is definitely a small but very loyal fanbase for matches like this, however
I am not a part of it — I’ve found hardcore wrestling to be repetitive and tedious and just
generally off-putting since it first became somewhat mainstream in the 1990s. It’s often
labeled “garbage wrestling,” and personally, I think that’s the perfect name for it.
But I digress — because while I think all of those are recurring problems with AEW’s
wrestling product, none of them are the actual subject of this video. The subject of this video
is what is, in my opinion, the biggest problem AEW has right now.
That problem is how bad the company is at using its three hours of weekly TV time.
Before I get too far into this, I want to acknowledge that I’m just a fan — a smart-ass
online fan, as I mentioned a moment ago. I’ve never wrestled, I’ve never worked in the wrestling
industry in any capacity. I’m functioning here as a fan and a critic, analyzing All-Elite Wrestling
as I would any other piece of media. You could say I’m armchair quarterbacking —
You could say that, and I am saying that, because that’s the phrase people sometimes use for what
I’m doing, but can I also say that I hate that phrase, because it’s a reference to North American
football, or as we here in North American call it, football, and I hate football? I hate it,
I hate it so much, I hate the game, I hate that it’s so popular, I hate the toxic fan
culture — I know it’s probably hypocritical for a pro wrestling fan to be calling out something
else for having a toxic fan culture, but fuck it, I’m doing it, football fan culture is horrible and
I hate it and I hate football and I wish it didn’t exist. Fuck it, it’s the worst sport.
On the subject of sports, while pro wrestling is not a legitimate sport, it is a theatrical
presentation that simulates a sport. Wrestlers face each other in wrestling matches, in which,
typically, there are winners and losers. There are other forms of interactions between wrestlers
on wrestling shows — they attack each other backstage, they talk
trash at each other in interviews, etc. — but the wrestling match is the most important element of
a wrestling show. Within the fiction of the show,
that is what the wrestlers are being paid to do — wrestle each other.
That being the case, who wins and who loses these matches
matters a great deal. A good wrestler is a wrestler who wins most of their matches;
a bad wrestler — well, you get the idea. Again, I’m speaking from an in-world perspective.
Most modern wrestling fans don’t weigh won-loss records very heavily when judging the talent of
wrestlers. A given wrestler can be highly skilled, extremely good at what they do, and still lose a
bunch of matches because that’s what they’ve been booked to do. Since the outcomes of wrestling
matches are predetermined, the best wrestler from a real-world perspective doesn’t always win.
But, from an in-world perspective, the wrestlers who win most of their matches
are the best wrestlers, the ones who earn opportunities for advancements,
the ones who get shots at championships, and so on. It naturally follows, then, that the most
compelling matches are ones between wrestlers, or teams of wrestlers, who have won most of their
matches. Because if Jon Moxley always wins, and he’s fighting Kenny Omega, who also always wins,
well, now one of them’s got to lose. Who’s it going to be?
Storytelling in pro wrestling, when it’s done right, is very, very simple. Whether
we’re talking about a long-term story that is told across weeks or even months of shows,
or the story of a single match, the plot and the character motivations are as basic as it gets.
This wrestler wants to prove they’re better than this wrestler. This wrestler holds a championship
that this wrestler wants. This wrestler was screwed over by this wrestler and wants revenge.
This minimalist approach to storytelling is one of pro wrestling’s greatest strengths as an art
form. But in order for it to work, in order for the audience to give a shit, they need to know
who the wrestlers are and why they should care.
If the hook of the match is that both wrestlers have excellent win/loss records and rarely lose,
we need to know that going in. If the hook is that Wrestler A has a grudge against Wrestler B for
screwing them out of a title shot a few weeks ago, we need to know that ahead of time.
In this way, wrestling is the same as any other narrative form.
For the characters and the stakes to mean anything to the audience, they need to be established.
If you want your wrestlers to establish themselves in the eyes of your TV audience,
then your TV audience needs to see them wrestle. In pro wrestling jargon, this process of
establishing characters with the audience is called “getting over.” When a wrestler is over,
that means the audience has accepted them as an important part of the show — whether the wrestler
is a babyface — a hero — or a heel — a villain — whether the audience wants to see them win,
or get their ass kicked, the most important thing is that the audience is invested, that they care.
But again, it’s difficult, if not impossible, for that to happen
when the audience doesn’t actually see that wrestler very often.
And, this is AEW’s biggest problem. Repeatedly throughout the nearly two-and-a-half years
since its flagship TV show Dynamite debuted, wrestlers have been introduced, sometimes with
great fanfare, wrestled a handful of matches on TV, then disappeared from TV for months at a time,
only to suddenly reappear and immediately involve themselves in another prominent storyline.
A recent example of this is the feud between two tag teams, Jurassic Express — the babyface team
— and the Gunn Club — the heel team — over the AEW World Tag Team Championship, held by Jurassic
Express. Several weeks ago, the Gunn Club, who hadn’t been seen much on either of AEW’s weekly
TV shows for months, abruptly challenged Jurassic Express to a match for the tag titles. The basis
of their challenge was that they were undefeated as a team, and therefore deserved a title shot.
How could a team that almost never wrestles on TV be undefeated?
What does an undefeated streak even mean if you don’t actually have matches in which
you could theoretically have been defeated? That brings me to another layer of this problem. See,
the Gunn Club’s claim to be undefeated was legitimate — again, within the fiction of
the show — it’s just that most of those matches they won weren’t on TV. They were on YouTube.
Besides its weekly TV shows on TBS and TNT, AEW also produces a pair of weekly YouTube shows,
Dark and Dark: Elevation. These shows are mostly devoted to promoting what are sometimes called
“squash matches.” A squash match is where a more established wrestler
faces an opponent who is presented as being beneath their level and not given much of a
chance to win. The more established wrestler shows off a few of their signature moves,
dominates the match, and typically wins in easy fashion. The whole point of a squash
match is to showcase the established wrestler, to make them look good. That’s why the lesser
opponents in these matches are often referred to as “enhancement talent.”
That’s their job: to enhance the presentation of the other wrestler, to make them look like a star.
Until about twenty-five years ago, when the competition between the WWF (now WWE) and WCW
compelled wrestling companies to have established stars wrestle each other on TV more often,
squash matches were by far the most common kinds of matches shown on weekly TV. To see major stars
wrestle each other, especially in matches that were part of an ongoing storyline, you usually had
to pay for it, either by buying a ticket to see a live show or ordering an event on pay-per-view.
A lot of fans don’t feel this way, but I actually like squash matches. They aren’t good according
to the standards by which we typically judge the quality of wrestling matches,
but they’re fun, they’re usually short, and they’re extremely useful in getting wrestlers
over. The wrestler who is being established as a star can win
convincingly, and the status of the wrestler who loses isn’t a concern,
because losing to the star is their reason for being there in the first place.
So, the Gunn Club built up an undefeated streak, wrestling mostly on the YouTube shows,
mostly in squash matches. That in and of itself isn’t necessarily a problem.
The greatest value of the YouTube shows is to allow members of the AEW
who aren’t regularly featured on TV to work, to wrestle, to get their reps in, so to speak. But,
episodes of Dark and Dark: Elevation typically top out in the range of 250,000 to 300,000
views on YouTube. That’s nothing to be ashamed of — shit, I’d kill to get numbers like that on
a consistent basis — I’d kill some of the people watching this video right now — not you, though.
The thing is, Dynamite, AEW’s flagship TV show, typically draws an audience of around a million
viewers. Assuming AEW’s YouTube shows and its TV shows are drawing from the same
pool of viewers, the YouTube shows are only being watched by about a quarter
of the television audience. So, when the Gunn Club shows up on TV
bragging about their winning streak, which happened almost entirely on YouTube,
it means nothing to the overwhelming majority of the audience, because they haven’t seen it.
I haven’t seen most of it! I like the YouTube shows. I watch them when I can. But,
I regularly watch both of AEW’s weekly TV shows, and most weeks, three hours of wrestling, plus the
occasional pay-per-view, is just about my limit. I love wrestling, but there’s other stuff I want
to watch. Also, I’ve got shit to do, and if you’re producing three hours of weekly TV, and a featured
storyline during those three hours doesn’t come across like it should unless I’ve also
watched two more hours of weekly YouTube content, this thing you’re doing? You’re doing it wrong.
It comes down to one of the most basic rules of storytelling, something that everyone
who has ever taken a creative writing class should know: show, don’t tell.
If you wanted the fact that the Gunn Club has an undefeated streak to mean anything to me,
a viewer of your TV show, you should have booked the undefeated streak to happen —
on your TV show! Or at least booked more of it to happen on the TV show. Obviously I have no problem
with wrestlers working the YouTube shows, but if we’d seen the Gunn Club on TV more often in
the months leading up to their feud with Jurassic Express, if we’d seen them winning, maybe cheating
to win some of the tougher matches — ‘cause they’re heels, ya known — the announcers making
the point that they’ve won so many matches in a row, that they have yet to lose a match as a team,
that their in-ring skills combined with their willingness to break the rules in order to win
makes them formidable opponents — if all or even some of that had happened on Dynamite
and Rampage instead of mostly on YouTube, then when the Gunn Club finally challenged the World
Tag Team Champions to a match, there would have been some momentum behind it, because we would
have seen this team building up a head of steam going into the match. And when Jurassic Express
beat them, retaining the titles and handling the Gunn Club their first loss as a team,
it would have meant something, because the undefeated streak would have meant something,
because we would have seen it as it happened, it would have been established.
You don’t even need to have any special knowledge about pro wrestling to get this.
It’s basic storytelling. If you want your audience to be invested in the outcome of
a particular event in your story, you need to show the audience what this event means — what
it means to the characters involved, what it will mean to the story going forward if there is
one outcome or another — so that the audience can get invested.
Ideally, the audience will not only get invested in seeing what happens next,
but they’ll invest in one particular outcome. This is especially desirable in wrestling, since
it tells its stories in the form of a fictional combat sport. The goal should be to get the
fans watching the wrestling matches to want one side to win. Yeah, it’s not a legitimate sport,
but that shouldn’t matter. You can know that the fight you’re watching
isn’t a real fight and still have a genuine rooting interest in the outcome.
I know Godzilla isn’t real — I mean, I’m like 90% sure — but when he fights Kong, I still want
him to win. Nothing against Kong — all respect to the King of Skull Island — or Faro Island,
as the case may be — but with Godzilla I’m ride or die, no hype, just facts, it is what it is.
The most maddening thing about AEW having this problem is that sometimes, they get it so
right. The recent rivalry between Bryan Danielson and World Champion Hangman Page,
and the ongoing feud between CM Punk and MJF, have been excellent. And yes,
most of the success of those stories is because the wrestlers involved
are so great — in the cases of Danielson and Punk, two of the best, ever — but part of it
is also — and I can’t believe I even have to point this out — that all the major events in
those stories took place on AEW’s TV shows, where most of the audience would see them.
There’s even a better example of an AEW wrestler having an undefeated streak:
Jade Cargill, currently the TBS Champion. Jade is a relatively new wrestler. She debuted on AEW TV
in November 2020 and had her first televised match in March of 2021, less than a year ago.
She has not yet lost a singles match. And while her undefeated streak does include
matches Jade wrestled on the YouTube shows, it also includes a lot of matches on Dynamite
and Rampage. Not quite every single week, but regularly, for the past year,
Jade has been booked to wrestle and win on TV. And the result is that she’s getting over.
She’s not the best wrestler on the show — she’s not terrible, and she’s improving constantly,
but she’s still green — and most of her matches have been squashes, but she looks good,
she’s impressive, and she’s established herself as someone who is difficult to beat.
In fact, she’s established herself as someone who is, to date, impossible to beat.
Jade is a heel. Eventually, a babyface will come along and beat her. I have no idea when,
but if I had to guess I’d say in the next few months, maybe after her undefeated streak has
lasted a full year. But whenever it happens, it will mean something, because the audience
of AEW’s TV shows has watched Jade pile up that undefeated streak this whole time.
Storytelling is about setups and payoffs. That’s especially true in a medium like pro wrestling,
where the form mimics a sport and the hooks are as basic as they get:
these two are gonna fight, who’s gonna win? But in order for me to care about the payoff,
I need to see the setup. You can’t just tell me there was a setup right before
I watch the payoff. You have to show it to me. Then, I can get invested.
I like AEW, a lot. There are obviously
very talented people producing these shows. It’s just frustrating how often they ignore this basic
principle of storytelling. Come on. It’s wrestling. This shit ain’t that hard . . .
. . . says the guy who’s never done it. But nevertheless—!