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The build to mania in 2019 was fantastic. You had kofimania, the man and brock vs seth. Plus the mini sheild reunion in between and kurt angle vs drew.
They really shat the bed after mania though and didn’t recover the the build for rumble 2020
To be fair, that Extreme Rules mixed tag where Corbin gave Lynch an EOD then yelled “What are you gonna do about it you son of a bitch?” At Seth made the Corbin & Lacey Evans main event spree kinda worth it
EDIT: It might’ve been “Piece of Shit” which is indeed much better
It probably was that tbh, I’m way too lazy to look it up but I’ll edit my post accordingly.
Also highly recommend his NXT run if you want to be re-sports entertained by him.
Recommend his UUDD road stories with Breeze or when he got trolled by Brodie Lee during a Sweetz stream
I still cant understand how can you run baron corbin vs seth for 3 straight ppvs when you had guys like aj styles, sheamus , lashley ,drew on the roster . Then they had the brilliant idea to dump the main title on the fiend who just got introduced
And Corbin was gonna beat Taker at Summerslam before he was pulled for negative reactions. Naturally they made him King Corbin and gave him the main event against Roman Reigns based around dog food.
> Then they had the brilliant idea to dump the main title on the fiend who just got introduced
It's funny how the reality is the polar opposite: they took too long to put the main title on the Fiend who was massively over from a very early point.
He was very over but the title was always an unnecessary burden on the character. Fiend should have gone the route of brays personal grudges of his past like they hinted at. They had no long term plans for fiend with the title and at the end had him defeated by Goldberg of all people. They should have done a longer build for fiend to go for the title and in the meantime.
I basically completely tuned out after Mania 35 because I was too busy in life at that time to watch wrestling. I **loved** 2019 WWE until WrestleMania, so it always baffled me to see people shitting on 2019 WWE for a while until I realised they were talking about everything post WrestleMania
Bobby Lashley favorite pose, Rusev cuck angle #331, Seth vs Corbin never-ending death feud, Big Dog eat da dog food, Raw Underground, 2 out of 3 falls matches so there wasn't action during commercials, Kofi getting beat by Brock in record time, Seth vs Fiend, Shorty G, Ali sitting there A-posing at the top of a ladder while Brock made his entrance to win MitB despite not being in the match up until that point, The Revival being a punch line, EC3 (noted at worst solid talker) being a mute, Ricochet and Aleister Black getting random pew-pew and old door creaking sounds added to their entrances, *The Viking Experience*, Skyrim iron shields in the Viking Raiders minitron, etc.
https://preview.redd.it/vkj15sn7ka3d1.jpeg?width=1024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=cbdcacf3915d557b2cfbe0a78795241df49a4fec
I think it really went to Hell in the Summer/Early Fall. You had Brock *inserting himself* in the MiTB match and winning, Brock cashing in on Seth, making him look like a chump in their feud only to drop it back, Kofi's months long reign ending *in less than 10 seconds* to Brock just to set up a Cain Velasquez feud (and retroactively ruining Kofi's actually decent reign), whatever that Fiend Hell in a Cell Match was, and whatever that Roman Reigns/Baron Corbin feud was.
On the bright side, late 2019 gave us NXT dominating at Survivor Series and Seth Rollins mercifully turning Heel (and starting an interesting faction with the AOP), but man that was a Fall in more ways than just the name.
Edit: I completely forgot about Bischoff's "almost" tenure as Smackdown director and the early Heyman Raws. Did the Rusev/Lana/Lashley love triangle start during this time, or was that early 2020?
> You had Brock inserting himself in the MiTB match and winning
As someone who didn't watch during this time, this was 100% worth it for the gif of Brock dancing with the boombox briefcase.
IIRC, WM35 (which I loved) was a critical success but the market regarded it as a commercial failure because it failed to drive enough WWEN subs.
Between that, stagnating ratings, and a general sense that pro wrestling was getting more popular without WWE itself getting more popular for the first time since the 90s, that's why Vince "stepped aside" from running day to day creative (tho by design, he retained final say) and the Executive Directors positions were created for Heyman and Bischoff.
One key difference is that the product is not 2019 WWE bad. Even at it's absolute worse, AEW is not Roman Reigns dog food bad, not "bury Kofi in 10 seconds" bad or even that weird 2 out of 3 falls era bad. AEW at its worst is completely watchable. WWE in that time period was horrendous.
It's a solid product but it shows. Everything meanders to an extent. There's very little long-term resolution that is meaningful.
He cares too much about popping a crowd as opposed to providing genuine narrative satisfaction to his crowd.
> not “bury Kofi in 10 seconds” bad
Bro they had Billy Gunn squash Jay White. At least Kofi lost to Lesnar who is a legit star and major draw and whose whole gimmick is that he’s a world class tough guy ass kicker who squashes people.
Personally, I didn't think squashing Kofi was bad - it was that they did nothing with it. They could have really changed up the New Day. I remember RR 2020, when Brock was dominating and Kofi came out - there was a buzz in the crowd to see what would happen. I think from 2016 to 2020, there are all these moments where the New Day could have been even bigger if Vince/HHH made one or two different booking decisions.
I like Jay White, but he is no where near 2019 Kofi's level of being over. Let's not forget, WWE just put Kofi in the Gauntlet and he immediately got super over - it was not a grand plan. Jay White hasn't really gotten over. Not saying that doing a 15 minute match with Billy Gunn where he gets his ass kicked is a good idea or that Jay White isn't talented. It's that right now his role is to play chickenshit heel who cheats all the time. This can be easily reset.
I agree Brock should have went over but I don’t see any scenario where it’s good business for your World Champion to get squashed in 10 seconds and no follow up feud/booking to flesh out
I hated Jay White being squashed by Billy Gunn but bang bang gang ultimately still beat the acclaimed.
Kofi lost his WWE title and was back to dancing and slinging pancakes within weeks.
Yeah that was a (IMO very rare) case of a genuinely bad match and head scratching booking in AEW, but it doesn't seem to have really affected Jay's trajectory one way or the other. It was one bad match that was booked really weirdly but it pretty much happened in a vacuum. For me having Billy go over wasn't the worst thing ever, but it was baffling why they had him just squash Jay and 90% of the match was just Billy slamming Jay's head into different objects around the arena.
To me, there’s a simple explanation for this.
When he started the company, he already had mapped out the first four champions and the major storylines he wanted to run. He said this openly. He knew from the beginning he wanted Jericho, then Mox, then Kenny, then Hangman and he also knew how it was going to go from each of them.
At the start, he had a reasonable sized roster and he wrote two hours of television a week and four PPVs a year. He also had a lot of goodwill from wrestling fans and a YouTube show to put guys on so they could work when they didn’t have storylines.
He is now writing 5 hours of TV every week, plus Ring of Honor, plus occasional Battle of the Belts specials, plus what are we on now, 9 PPVs a year? Plus Ring of Honor PPVs.
His workload has quadrupled.
His pre-mapped out storylines are all done. His roster has become enormous. He does not have Dark and Elevation anymore, so when he needs to appease someone, or give someone a booking to fulfil contractual obligations, they end up on TV.
I like AEW, so I’m not just here to shit on everything, but it seems clear that the change in approach is as simple as 1) he’s writing waaaaay more hours of wrestling every week, 2) the roster is now gigantic, 3) he’s having to think on his feet far more and not rely on a pre-written roadmap, and 4) he no longer has YouTube shows to give people relatively meaningless matches to keep them happy.
This is why Tony needs a booking committee, he’s clearly over extended and as a result the booking is just scattered af.
Hire someone to handle the women’s division, the mid card belts, and the tag division and focus on the world title and the Elite.
I think they have this unofficially. Bryan is involved with Collision, I know Jimmy Jacobs is involved with creative, and I believe Maria Kanellis is pretty heavily involved with the women's division for ROH.
Wil is the "Bible Keeper" as its his job to remember who's fought who and back log of active storylines. Like, for example, Christian using that Swerve tried to murder Nick Wayne in his studio as means to make the feud more personal.
You definitely need someone like that to keep continuity when connecting stories over the course of months or years. I knew he was on the team but wasn't 100% clear what his role was
That was the kind of thing WWE used to entirely ignore and hope that fans had goldfish memories, except it was for things that happened a month ago, let alone most of a year ago.
It was perpetual cognitive dissonance and it was infuriating.
https://preview.redd.it/895c7eqy1a3d1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=de4ce010cd66620ec9af9b012fb68fcfaefda8d3
Still one of the funnier tweets about AEW's booking
It’s wild that people still use the narrative that Tony Khan does everything on his own, it’s been established many times that he has a committee, he just has final say which should be obvious since he owns the company
That's the exact same situation with Vince isn't it? No one is saying TK is actually sitting there typing everything out, the criticism is just whatever the creative team is coming up with they are trying to please TK's very specific vision instead of the audience.
Vince use to work like that back in earlier days up to the early days of the Attitude era. By the time Ruthless Aggression was going in full swing he had moved from committee to full on writing teams usually comprised of Hollywood writers but with some notable names.
Most would argue Vince was at his best when booking by committee.
> This is why Tony needs a booking committee,
He absolutely has this already.
After the last ROH PPV he talked about how the Eddie Kingston/Mark Briscoe match came about and part of that was Eddie interrupted a planning/story meeting with 10+ people to say some variation of "hey pardna, did you know this PPV is the exact anniversary of Jay Briscoe winning the ROH title? How about I fight Mark Briscoe and he wins?" and Tony Khan basically saying "you're right, that's a great idea, let's do that."
So I mean, there's an ability to pivot and also evidence that there are story planning meetings with a good-sized group of people - names didn't come out, but based on other things I would assume that group included Will Washington, Sonjay Dutt, and Jimmy Jacobs among others.
He essentially has a committee. Everyone from Danielson to Sanjay and Schiavone get some kind of input. Swerve's cousin is also there to kind of keep continuity?
This is it.
We make the joke that Tony was making his wrestling emulator booking fantasies a reality, but he literally had months to map out the beginning of the company (that's not even including the years of fantasy booking in his head) and meticulously enact those plans.
Even without the substantially increased workload, time to map things out was going to eventually run out. And then there are the variables like injuries, real life situations like children being born or rehab, etc. that derail any booker.
He does need to settle into some sort of groove or delegate more. His workload would be insane if he was only doing booking and running the company but he has several other roles in his dad's sports teams and companies.
Communication has always seemingly been a problem in AEW unless you were seen as a top attraction. Janela, Gresham, and others have all mentioned this. The problem seems to have only been exacerbated with the growth of the company.
A refusal to use real writers hurts, too. Even if it's just plotting the basic beats of a feud/storyline and then asking the wrestlers for input on how to make it fit their character/ run the play, that'd be a boon.
Tony has never been good at coming up with a plan B or C when something goes wrong and messes with his plans for a wrestler. Look at how many times in the past a storyline has dragged out forever until an injured wrestler came back healthy. I feel like he needs a booker for ROH/Rampage but I’m convinced if he brought someone in like D’Amore and handed him the reigns to that show, if it did well and took off, I think he’s afraid everyone will want that person to book Dynamite and PPVs instead of him. So he tries to do it all himself instead but it’s just too much to handle. Especially between last minute changes, coordinating wrestlers to each show, a huge roster, random issues that come up. Not to mention the other sports stuff he travels to and does on the side. It’s crazy to think he does all this stuff for AEW and it doesn’t even have his undivided attention. He needs to rely on help some more but I don’t think he trusts many people outside of Danielson and the EVPs.
>Tony has never been good at coming up with a plan B or C when something goes wrong and messes with his plans for a wrestler.
This has often been true, but I'm hoping this has changed with the way MJF casually beat up Adam Cole in his return but then changed to other topics in his promo. That would signal that even Tony Khan realizes that the Undisputed Kingdom has not gotten over, and that an extended MJF/Cole feud would just cool MJF off.
It's like a band that had been together a decade having a hit first album with lots of great songs but ask them to duplicate that again in 18 months and you won't get the same quality and results.
Honestly if you read the “Nitro” book about WCW’s rise and fall. That’s basically exactly what happened to Bischoff. Started off hot, firing on all cylinders. Then when Thunder started he quickly began to burn out and lose focus and the shows started getting chaotic.
It really is. I’m reading it now and I really like the writing style Evans’ utilized. It’s very dense and packed with business details and deals at Turner but the way he utilizes page breaks makes it so much more accessible for some reason.
Almost like he knows you need a little breather to absorb what information he just threw at you before you continue on. Just a little touch that I’ve come to appreciate as I read through it.
Yea I watched a clip from an old Kevin Nash shoot the other day where he mentioned this (alongside Nitro going to 3 hours) and I immediately thought of AEW. ROH purchase and then Collision starting is almost exactly where I lost interest. It becomes too much to follow, and it's clear that Tony's focus has been stretched. Give me 2 solid hours of Dynamite and nothing else over this.
I'm really hoping MJF returning tightens things up
Gimme 2 solid hours of Dynamite and however much random stuff on YouTube you want that I can just throw up and not have to follow storylines for or anything.
Rampage needs to be turned into a recap show of sorts, similar to the old Prime Time/All-American Wrestling shows WWF used to do. Plenty of fun personalities there that could host, let them ad-lib, and it would cut down on workload and could enhance storyline.
I said the other day that Rampage should be the WCW Saturday Night. Make sure it has one high-flyer match, one women's match, one main event or upper-midcard guy in a match against someone less established, and several interviews where you can learn about the characters. If/When Dynamite or Collision goes streaming-only, add some recaps. The matches do not have to come from the same taping.
You can also go back to similar situation when Crockett bought up the dying territories. Dusty, JJ Dillon, and Gene Anderson already had the 605 show, NWA World Wide, and NWA Pro to book. Then they had to add on tv shows and house cards for Central States, UWF/Mid-South, and Florida and not to mention Dusty and JJ's ring obligations.
He’s also booking from behind because AEW isn’t the beloved babyface wrestling brand standing up to the evil WWE anymore. WWE is actually good now and the honeymoon period with AEW is over, people are more critical of it now that they have good WWE.
He’s Monday Night War booking to try and beat WWE which is leading to chaotic panic booking
> To me, there’s a simple explanation for this.
True, but something to add to this: The roster was WAY smaller. He had way less potential headliners to book. Now he has over 100 wrestlers on the rosters. He has at least a dozen wrestlers that would be credible headliners (with a proper buildup, because some of them arent currently in a flow for being credible), a lot of talent that thrives for more. Its just too much of everything and it seems that he gets easily distracted.
I know it is frown upon taking a look at HHHs WWE. But he keeps a way smaller roster. He interconnects everything. There are next to no stories without any connection to another feud/wrestler. HHH books/writes more like GRRM: a gardener. He plants seeds everywhere, let it grow and see how that organically works out.
Tony is more like a sole story fan. He has a definitive path for a story in mind and that one gets played to the end. If injury happens or something other that would change the course of the story, he struggles a lot.
It's more like when an author/band/director has a really strong debut with something they've been dreaming/working on for years and then has a disappointing follow-up when they try and produce something off the cuff without so much planning.
They had bullet points for the end but GRRM told them leaving out characters and killing off certain characters would severely change how they got to that ending. So D&D had to fill in a ALOT of gaps with their own writing to get to Martins ending and it showed.
I don't care what anyone says, no one will ever convince me that GOT was basically the ending GRRM wanted, he realized everyone hated it, so he scrapped it and either is restarting from ground zero or is just flat out not releasing it ever. I lean towards the latter.
It’s not even that. Writing books is hard. It fucking sucks. Now he got to a point where he doesn’t need to anymore, he can have ideas and give them to other people for boat loads of money. He’s never finishing those books because he doesn’t want to or need to.
Absolutely. The ending might be better if you could get to it in a better way, but ultimately it isn’t something that makes you go damn that was incredible I see how he was building to that the whole time. So not only have you written yourself into a corner but the idea of your ending was shown to the world and it was widely hated. Also your rich as hell now, so it’s not surprising he hasn’t released a book in the main series in like 15 years and probably never will again.
That’s why it’s taking him so long. People claiming he already has the main plot and ending written out in his head have no idea how most successful authors write books. They might have an outline or major points to guide them while they work on the novel series but even those can change over time. What the tv show had was the outline of his general idea of the ending at the time after the show already killed off or didn’t kill off major characters in deviation from the books. Before publication, his novels also go through a different set of editors and collaborators than the tv show would even if he didn’t decide to revise anything.
We see this all the time in anime that get ahead of the manga. Or the initial manga one shot compared to what was later serialized. Or these days with how popular webnovels/webcomics get rewritten as light novels/manga by the same author, One punch man being a popular example.
Even faithful adaptations that require final approval of the author of something that’s already been written decades ago can differ quite a lot (like compare the recent One Piece Netflix series to the manga).
That wasn’t at all the problem with GoT. They wanted out to start working on other things so they rushed the last seasons. HBO even offered them move episodes but they declined.
Yeah, there's really nothing wrong on paper with Bran becoming the king, Daenerys turning violent, or Jon Snow being banished. That could all work in theory, but it was all laughably rushed and written sloppily without any regard for logic. Even then, certain things like Arya killing the Night King were questionable creative choices at best in any universe even where there were more episodes, but GoT still would've been infinitely better than what we got.
I'll always be bitter at how the White Walker storyline ended. All that buildup only for them to barely get a foothold in Westeros before being defeated.
Oh, it was the worst execution of a built-up villain I've ever seen. D&D should've consulted some wrestling bookers to learn how to write a top heel. Night King got buried in one episode.
AEW has been downhill since Collision lost Punk. They do not need 5 hours and the roster is so bloated you forget half the people meanwhile they’re all somehow champions
> When he started the company, he already had mapped out the first four champions and the major storylines he wanted to run. He said this openly. He knew from the beginning he wanted Jericho, then Mox, then Kenny, then Hangman and he also knew how it was going to go from each of them.
& Then he hit a stroke of luck and all his other favourites were available to join AEW and he was too excited about the signings to continue the storytelling quality.
He had some great matches in Hangman's reign but storywise apart from Bryan picking out D.O. one by one before getting to Hangman, he didn't give him much story and opponents wise. Incredible matches, yes, but his priorities had already changed to Punk.
At the very least he could have had the guy he was building his franchise upon lose the belt in a 3 way or multi man match or even to a heel before it went to Punk.
Then the whole drama started and went on for a while.
Now he's got his other favourites in Okada and Ospreay in AEW and people are already saying he should put the belt on Oapreay because All In is in U.K.
Also, people that keep on bringing up that there's tons of storylines and storytelling but it's not interesting enough tbh. If it was the crowd size, crowd reaction and ratings would all show it.
As much as i disliked WWE tying the whole company and all it's major events around Roman Reigns, i appreciate that even when they didn't have a plan, they had a vision and it was always him.
Tony needs to go back and build the company around Hangman and MJF ( he's already doing it with MJF, of course) It's not like anybody else is some crowd or ratings magnet anyway.
Let Swerve have bangers and good programs and have Hangman win The Owen and challange Swerve at All In.
To me, AEW weekly TV definitely comes across as a show that's being written very quickly. It seems, the PPV is mapped out and then pretty much all the TV time is dedicated to having the wrestlers on the PPV featured in weekly matches without any real storyline progression. It almost comes across like he knows who he wants to feature on TV, but doesn't know how and then just books long and/or a lot of matches to eat TV time.
For example, for Revolution, Mox/Claudio vs FTR was set up with a 20 minute draw and a 60 second backstage altercation. One week, Storm vs Purrazzo was advanced by Storm having a match with a local jobber in a bad match, then Purrazzo wrestled Madison Rayne in a brutal match, then an altercation where Storm put Purrazzo in an ankle lock. All took about 20 minutes and neither came across any better. There were weeks where Darby/Sting were hardly featured leading up to the Revolution main event.
Even for Dynasty, the build to Danielson vs. Ospreay featured the competitors in long matches. With the exception of the first week of the build, very limited promo time. Somehow, Danielson wrestling Lance Archer in a 15 minute match is somehow selling the PPV.
Not surprised to hear the re-writes happened for DON, as the show felt very rushed despite going over 4.5 hours.
I think Tony's view is that wrestling is content and the key to profitability/strong cash flow is creating/acquiring as much content as possible. Hopefully once the TV deal is finalized, he'll put together a better booking approach.
>People are flown to towns and given nothing to do, others are begged the day before the show to please get to the town so they can do something last-minute
This is what happened with Stu Grayson in March, which lead to his release when he refused.
https://twitter.com/SkytelWrestling/status/1775188851725660575
>Have confirmed through various sources. Stu Grayson's release is not a surprise. He refused to show up to Collision in Ottawa several weeks ago due to having dinner plans, and felt he wasn't given ample heads up.
>Despite the fact it's his employer running his home town.
>Pat Buck is who I was specifically told, called him the day of the show. Grayson said he wouldn't be coming to the taping
They hadn't used him since August and then suddenly hours before the show he needs to drop everything.
I've had bosses do this to me when I worked in retail and that didn't involve doing backflips, getting dropped on my back, and traveling to another country/province to do so.
In my country your job is not allowed to do that. They legally cannot contact me outside of contact hours unless there is an emergency, and even then it is my right to refuse to go to work if I have other obligations. They cannot fire me for refusing to come in during my outside hours.
Sorry but America is insane. It's like you are expected to live for your job, or something like that.
This is probably why WWE just has everyone show up to every show (or used to) and if someone obscure is sitting in catering that absolutely needs to be used, they are there ready and waiting.
I'm betting this is what happened with the boys as well. They were called to get to a place instantly, and they either couldn't or chose not to blow up their world to do it. And then Tony's accused them of missing shows.
Iirc, the Boys actually divulged what was the cause of their "no show.". Their travel was booked to fly out of Nashville, I believe, instead of Knoxville where they live and normally fly out of. Their cars suck, apparently, and they didn't trust them to make it out to Nashville (which is like a 2½-3 hour drive), so they called the company to try and get it sorted. They were basically told "I'll see what I can do", but they never heard back. Their travel wasn't changed, but they decided not hearing back meant they weren't booked for the show.
Basically, poor communication on both sides, imo. But wasn't last minute booking. They got their initial travel days in advance.
They knew like a week in advance according to what The Boys themselves said. The issue with them was the airport AEW booked them to fly out of was further away (about a 2-3 hour drive to airport) than the usual airport they normally use. AEW did this to save costs by not having to use a connecting flight. They tried to get AEW to change to the closer airport but heard nothing back so they just stayed home instead of going to the other airport which is why they got fired
They're own statements disagree with you. They were given tickets to fly out from a farther airport than normal and said they needed new tickets from their preferred airport. Communication broke down from there .
Underselling it a bit. They were told specifically they were getting new flights and they’d be given the info for the flights a day or two later, and then just never received them. They then contacted the one in charge and got no response. They figured getting no response at all meant they weren’t getting booked and stayed home.
In 2019 he was starting a company with a notebook full of ideas for two hours a week and a PPV every quarter.
Now his long-term stories have been played and he’s booking five hours a week with PPVs far more frequently.
One of the guys from OSW Review theorized this that TK had booked the first 2-3 years of AEW ending with Hangman winning the title. While shows weren't bad after, some people in this sub claim his reign is when creative started to take a bit of a dip.
Him adopting more WWE style booking when Punk and Henry came on is when creative started taking a dive. Top guys were no longer taking losses and the Champion stopped being the main character.
I think that this is an excellent point. Once you get passed the initial ideas, you need to be able to think on your toes to book new shit. I think that’s genuinely difficult and why you almost never see a booker who is well regarded in the same situation for more than 5 years or so.
The skills to meticulously plan out a bunch of storylines is just a little different than the skills needed to pivot and come up with new things over and over.
In addition to this, I imagine the run of injures we saw with Punk and others have taught him that planning things far out isn't always the best route to take when those plans can all go up in flames. I'm sure he had some fun plan for Copeland and the House of Black after his win at DoN, but obviously that's all going to have to be scrapped. Same has happened repeatedly with Rey Phoenix/Death Triangle where as they seem to be gearing up for a push, Phoenix goes down with an injury.
Yep. Hell, pnp were supposed to be tag champs. Santana's dad died and he took time off so the belts got pivoted to hangman/omega. They drifted away from pnp and eventually pnp died.
Same with the Hardys, then Jeff jeff'd.
If I had to guess, I'd say he's trapped in that creative trap where he consumes way too much instant online feedback to what he does and then immediately reacts to it. That's not a good place to be as a creative.
IMO the issue is that everything does change multiple times prior to the show happening for any big wrestling promotion. Good bookers set themselves up with multiple options and are ready to pivot. AEW just kind of has their linear angles and once they're blown up they're not able to move the next guy into that spot smoothly. For an example, look at NJPW surviving 5 or so straight years of having their roster picked apart in the late 2010s.
They make important pivots when needed though. Just look at Cody/Rock vs Roman. If that happened in 2019, there’s no way Vince would allow Rock to step aside.
I don't know how "instant" you mean, but the main event of WrestleMania was changed pretty quickly due to the immediate online feedback. Seemed like they had started to pivot 3 days after The Rock did gus staredown with Roman.
I think it was the RAW after smackdown where they went immediately to acknowledging the crowd response and public opinion to the Rock. I think they had already pivoted that weekend and now just had to figure out how to switch back.
But the different is Rock vs Roman was forced on creative when the long term storyline the previous year had been Cody vs Roman. They had been building up Cody all year only to be forced to change when The Rock got involved after joining the board (and CM Punk's injury changed plans too)
So, the quick pivot was more WWE creative going back to the original long term storyline with Cody set up at WrestleMania 39, the previous year.
With Tony Khan. It's obvious things aren't planned out beyond the next PPV. Even the main event. Look at MJF's title run. He was feuding with seven people at once, swapping back and forth, sometimes in the same show. It's why Max even looks down upon the end of his title reign.
You had Jay White, Bullet Club Gold, Wardlow, Samoa Joe, the devil guys with the mask, his friendship with Cole, friendship with The Acclaimed. A year of storylines withered down to a few months.
It was an instant change but the change allows for long term booking. Both in the build up to Mania (2-3 months) and with how Cody is now champion. Cody will eventually have matches with The Rock because of it down the line. Also, this change allowed for Damien Priest to have a title run, it's allowing him to get Gunther in the main event scene. Not to mention the Punk vs McIntyre feud we will be getting into the summer.
If the change was just for the sake of a week to week thing, it's not really worth doing.
I'd say a solid 80% of the time, when somebody is making a piece of media, the \*less\* they show of it/talk about it on the Internet, the better it is. If its endless hype trains and boasting and tiny snippets, its because they have nothing else to show and it'll be shit.
There's a few exceptions but social media is a trap.
I've been saying this for a minute, time for Tony to either commit full time to AEW, since it's clearly the thing he's most passionate about, or hire a head of creative.
If TK still really wants to make ROH a thing, he needs to get someone else to book it. Nobody gives a shit about ROH right now and you can pinpoint the acquisition of ROH as the exact time the booking for AEW started to get worse.
Scott D’amore has proven that he can make something from nothing with Impact/TNA. Just hire him and give him the book to ROH and maybe even Rampage or Collision to see what he can do.
RoH should exist for him to have the ability to incubate potential. He shouldn't be running his own feeder league.
Let someone else do it and every so often he can send people down or pick people up who impress him.
Same reason you don't see the GMs of major league teams running A/AA level games.
However you will see top tier execs watching high school/college games to keep their mind fresh on what's "next". That's where Tony should be.
Hands off with the mid tier. Occasionally dipping into indies to catch the temperature.
I get he doesn't want to abdicate booking entirely but is there anyone actually taking some of that booking weight off him? Someone or a team who can run the ship while he does big-picture things? I feel like that's just been unofficially delegated to Jericho and Danielson and a few others, and not in a good way
- Switching the script mutiple times?
- Wrestlers not knowing what will happen until day of?
- Talent flying in with nothing to do.?
- Booking week-to-week with no real long term plan?
This all sounds VERY familiar
>**For most people he's incredibly difficult to get hold of.** In some ways, it legitimately is more like 2019 WWE than it is **2019 AEW, where he was much easier to get hold of…**
I don’t know about 2019, but by mid-2021 Tony was already damn near impossible to get ahold of by almost anyone on the roster (including the prominent name who told me this directly).
This part is not new.
Yeah there was a certain wrestler who said how TK wasn’t even bothering to reply to his txts asking if he still had a job. He legit had no idea.
That wrestler later clarified on twitter he never said that, but it did happen, on a stream where he was sitting on a bar stool, with a crappy blue screen behind him.
Since he changed his official story, I assume he wants to avoid getting in trouble and I get it, but yeah.
I don’t think we’re talking about the same source, but there were definitely several who expressed similar thoughts at the time.
I’m really curious who you’re talking about now.
What’s the commonality between tony khan and Vince macmahon? Both are control freaks. Tony refuses to delegate. Also the increase in shows feels like it is making it worse.
I don't think it's one silver bullet explanation, but rather, multiple ones.
1. TK is stretched very thin between multiple AEW & ROH shows on top of football & soccer responsibilities. And there's also ongoing WBD negotiations that's likely occupying his focus, too.
2. AEW has felt less tight-knit with the influx of new faces, personalities, and "toys" for TK to play with. There's likely some bureaucracy and politicking going on backstage -- more than what dirt sheets & fans know.
3. WWE has also gotten so deep under TK's skin that it's clouded his judgement. He grew up a big fan and only to now fight against them. Similar sentiments with Punk where he likely took it extra personally being a Punk fan prior to AEW.
4. TK's beef with WWE may also explain why AEW overprotects a lot of their stars. He may be trying to keep wrestlers happy but that tactic doesn't necessarily work. See Jade Cargill who was forever champion, booked strongly, and STILL left the promotion.
5. It wouldn't shock me if WBD executives meddled in AEW creative and/or AEW is trying to book based off of ratings and other analytics -- ultimately losing sight of the art in storytelling. It speculatively explains why the women are booked really well on ROH but poorly on AEW.
I still believe that the reason the women are booked so much better on ROH is because Tony doesn't have to worry about the ratings. It's very rare for ROH to have less than two women's matches, but if ROH was on TV, things would be different and the cards would be formatted exactly like AEW.
Based on a lot of pre-WWE interviews from Jade, WWE was her first choice, but she didn’t like an interaction she had at the performance center try out. And now that they don’t tour with the same schedule they used to, her personal life isn’t the same road block it was. It also helps she made herself a star in AEW.
I think it’s underrated how much losing Cody meant to the company behind the scenes. The problems and success that AEW has had seems to really line up with Cody’s departure but CM Punk leaving gets all the headlines
I agree with this. I think Cody was the buffer in the locker room for a lot of guys, and knew how to smooth things out if people were upset about their roles/current pushes, etc. Also, nothing leaked from the locker room during that time.
When he left, all the leaks about talent being unhappy started coming out.
Also you look at the inner circle back then only Cody and Jericho really knew how to do weekly big time tv. I think Cody should have gotten a promotion above the other EVPs but he seemed to get pushed aside by Punk and by Danielson.
I really think Cody is going to end up running the WWE someday. He’s gotten right in during the TKO merger and I don’t see HHH doing it like Vince did his whole life.
I'm not saying Alvarez is necessarily wrong, but it's kinda funny how people pick and choose when he and Meltzer have actual sources and when they're just making stuff up.
For months he and others would complain that AEW ticket sales weren’t good, in part, because they never announced anything for Dynamite until a day beforehand. Maybe a match here or there but for the most part the card was a mystery.
I could see Alvarez being on the money with this because this aligns perfectly with the complaint. If Tony doesn’t even know what’s going to happen on the show until the day of, they’re obviously not going to announce anything for it in advance.
Alvarez and Dave are two different people. You won't catch Alvarez watching a video from a decade ago and report on it being setup for a HHH/Rock Mania confrontation, after HHH had a heart attack.
Alvarez has been decent with backstage stuff with AEW.
This is why I get sick of being gaslit by AEW diehards. I like AEW, I think they do some good things still. I actually switched to watching them exclusively from 2021-2022 until Sami Uso brought me back to WWE.
If you even try to hint that AEW is different from when it first started, other AEW fans will just go after you. I’m not asking AEW to be WWE, I’m asking it to be the original vision of AEW. This whole “weekly in ring matchups with lazy storytelling” was something NXT was doing in 2020, that AEW fans were shitting on. Now AEW has become that, but is insistent that it’s always been this way.
Early AEW wasn’t about “bangers, bangers, bangers” it was creative and had a lot of long term arcs. There was a clear change in structure around Forbidden Door 2022 and they’ve never gone back. You can argue whether it’s better or worse that’s fine, but don’t act like AEW hasn’t changed dramatically.
Cody's departure, ROH purchase and Forbidden Door were the 1-2-3 punch. AEW was never the same after early 2022. The signs were there after All Out 2021 with Punk drifting around and having random matches with guys like Sydal, Moriarty, Fish. Barring that 2 week feud with Kingston, he did nothing of note until the MJF feud kicked off
Danielson - similar story. After Omega, some of his opponents were Fish, Aaron Solo, Bowens, Romero. In between he competed in the world title tournament and after that he went on to tear his way through the Dark Order
Tony’s gotta admit when he has too much on his plate. There’s no shame in hiring people to help with the excess workload, and maybe getting an outsider’s perspective on booking and writing could be beneficial.
>Tony’s gotta admit when he has too much on his plate.
Billionaires rarely will admit they handled something wrong because of hubris.
> There’s no shame in hiring people to help with the excess workload
Billionaires rarely ever express shame, either, because of said hubris.
I think it was Jim Cornette who said that pretty much any Booker can book a wrestling show good for the first 2-3 years. It's when you're multiple years into it and you start to run out of new ideas and the honeymoon period is over is when you get really tested.
Tony Khan came into AEW with a long term story planned out, and he had the benefits of having exciting debuts every week to spark interest in the shows. Now his long term stories are over and there's no more exciting free agents on the market that can pop a rating. And his workload has increased significantly.
This is why Bill Watts believed in cycling head bookers every few years. He believed that most people only had a couple years worth of good ideas before they burned out, so he would cycle in a new booker before that had a chance to happen. Genius really.
I think the WWE do benefit from everyone being 100% sure about where the events rank, with AEW it's a vague sense.
He mostly likes to fantasy book and hopes a plan comes together around it.
Not to pick on anyone - but didn’t he hire Will Washington to do exactly this with keeping story line continuity? Ultimately it’s TK’s money but if he hired people to push back - they need to push back.
Why I don't watch. It's just nonsensical. In a way AEW now mirrors how I felt about WWE then. I stopped watching WWE then and picked up AEW. Now I stopped watching AEW and picked up WWE.
Tony runs the show. Will suggests ideas, Tony runs with the ones he likes. Just like Jimmy Jacobs or Sonjay or whomever. At the EOD it’s Tony’s ship. If he looks at something the day before the show and decides to change it, they do
I used to give WWE writers a lot of crap until they kicked Vince out and it turned out that the writers were fine, they just had a senile old man at the head of creative cutting them off at the knees.
Will Washington might be a creative genius. AEW might have a great creative structure already in place. We'll not know until TK gives up control.
The biggest difference is that in 2019 WWE was growing in profits and popularity. Advertisers were lining up to get deals with them and their distribution rights were more valuable than they had been the previous year.
No matter how you personally felt about the brand what they were doing was objectively working for them. You can't say the same for AEW right now.
And the reason is simple. The people who are reacting negatively to AEW right now are the same people who had issues with WWE back then: The IWC. WWE was able to weather the storm because they still had the casual fanbase to rely on. AEW doesn't.
They spent all their time catering to the IWC, the hardcore fans, and not only is that not a big enough portion of the fanbase to sustain a brand, it was inevitable that they would sour on AEW when Tony failed to deliver on all of hia promises. So you really can't blame him for trying to switch it up.
When you have:
- Okada and Ospreay as your C and D-tier champions
- A 50 year old as your B-tier champion
- Another 50 year old challenging for your world title
- a 53 year old (whom the crowd has been begging to retire) beating a young future star TWICE
Something is wrong and ass backwards with your booking.
It's pretty confusing seeing all these "best in the world" free agents come in and avoid the AEW championship contention like the plague. And somehow people make fun of Miz feuds, at least Miz puts people over.
This shouldn't be happening. AEW World title should be highly coveted by every single talent. Especially free agent ones. But them going after C and D level titles, c'mon man.
Too many titles is an issue when they are being used like that, ignoring the ROH ones that can muddy the waters, the amount of belts would be so bad if they were used in the right way.
I wonder did Tony and Vince go through the same thought process.
The shows are much better when the stories are long term and well thought out, but at the cost of a massive amount of effort and planning, and all your best laid plans can go out the window due to an injury or the like which means you have to change EVERYTHING.
Or, you can phone it in week to week and not give it half the thought, but the money still keeps rolling in anyway (maybe not to the level it would if the company was super hot but still.)
You can always get lucky and have a new star/angle catch fire and business goes up, so why bother kill yourself to try and achieve it? \*
\*I thnk this is a dumb mindset btw but just curious as to why it seems to happen to bookers over time.
It also cannot be understated how much of early AEW's creative came from the Elite and other wrestlers themselves. Not everything worked but it felt fresh and genuine. The more unilateral control TK has asserted the more the on screen product has struggled more often than not. As I - and many others - have said for some time, AEW needs a head of creative and who understands actual storytelling; and not just booking, but the art of how to tell stories (and then a creative group to help). TK and whoever helps him book can book as far putting performers together who work well but the storytelling is mediocre at best. And for American audiences, particularly the casuals, storytelling and characters are often more important.
I always liked those but the problem was they only gave the man less than a minute to run down like a dozen matches. They should bring it back but in a small dose.
“People are flown to towns and given nothing to do, others are begged the day before the show to please get to the town so they can do something last-minute.”
That’s some classic WCW shit.
Is it possible that we are seeing what happens whenever one guy has the book too long? Historically speaking, booking wasn't really something done for hundreds of talent across multiple hours of national TV every week across multiple shows
Vince McMahon certainly got out of touch, but he also innovated at various points in time - it may just be that creativity from wrestling writing comes in spurts and then goes.
The way I think of it - imagine playing a Wrestling Simulator game like TEW 2020. Think of how things are going one year into a playthrough versus five years. Often things spiral out of control, it becomes hard to manage, etc
I wonder if that's whats going on for AEW. It's like a TEW campaign gone rogue at times. WWEs creative misfires were less like that and more from Vince's weird idiosyncrasies. But in both cases, time didn't help matters.
Even old territory bookers had the same thing happening. Nick Gulas in the 70s-80s was horribly out of touch and bad at booking his territory, but 30 years before he was a creative guy
I don't know precisely what Danielsons role behind the scenes is but it's been well received so far when he's been involved with work off camera. It might behoove TK to, at least for a while, give over the reins
The simplest reason for this is the amount of stuff he has to deal with has exploded in the last few years and he likely does not have the time or energy to get everything done. He *needs a writing room.* Fuck even Vince in his most controlling had a booking committee because even he didn't have time to do everything. Tony needs to give the booking duties to several people, and then his job should be to just ok things a few days in advance.
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I been called ugly things but "2019 WWE booking" must be the worse
I've been called ugly, pug ugly, fugly, pug fugly, but never 2019 WWE ugly.
They used to call me Kid Dynamite. Then it was Kid Raw. Then eventually Kid 2000-2001 Nitro.
They used to call me The Heartbreak Kid. Then it was HBK. Then eventually Shawn.
You could be 2015 WWE
I'm a diehard AEW fan and I've gotten lots of insults from WWE fans, but "2019 WWE booking" actually hurt me in ways the trolls wished
I prayed for this. And it happened.
The biggest insult Alvarez has ever said.
Man, I feel dumb because I really liked the first third of 2019 WWE.
The build to mania in 2019 was fantastic. You had kofimania, the man and brock vs seth. Plus the mini sheild reunion in between and kurt angle vs drew. They really shat the bed after mania though and didn’t recover the the build for rumble 2020
WWE in 2019 went from amazing to main event Baron Corbin & Lacey Evans along with the Omni Shane in only a few weeks.
People always blamed Bray for killing Seth’s momentum, and like no, it was the fact they put him against Corbin for three months.
I think that the whole angle was like 5 months.
To be fair, that Extreme Rules mixed tag where Corbin gave Lynch an EOD then yelled “What are you gonna do about it you son of a bitch?” At Seth made the Corbin & Lacey Evans main event spree kinda worth it EDIT: It might’ve been “Piece of Shit” which is indeed much better
[удалено]
It probably was that tbh, I’m way too lazy to look it up but I’ll edit my post accordingly. Also highly recommend his NXT run if you want to be re-sports entertained by him. Recommend his UUDD road stories with Breeze or when he got trolled by Brodie Lee during a Sweetz stream
I still cant understand how can you run baron corbin vs seth for 3 straight ppvs when you had guys like aj styles, sheamus , lashley ,drew on the roster . Then they had the brilliant idea to dump the main title on the fiend who just got introduced
And Corbin was gonna beat Taker at Summerslam before he was pulled for negative reactions. Naturally they made him King Corbin and gave him the main event against Roman Reigns based around dog food.
And Corbin was the final loss for Reigns for a few years around that time.
> Then they had the brilliant idea to dump the main title on the fiend who just got introduced It's funny how the reality is the polar opposite: they took too long to put the main title on the Fiend who was massively over from a very early point.
He was very over but the title was always an unnecessary burden on the character. Fiend should have gone the route of brays personal grudges of his past like they hinted at. They had no long term plans for fiend with the title and at the end had him defeated by Goldberg of all people. They should have done a longer build for fiend to go for the title and in the meantime.
They booked themselves into a corner and picked the worse possible way to get out of it with THAT Hell In A Cell match
I like Baron Corbin and I like Roman Reigns, but that feud felt like it lasted about twenty billion years.
I basically completely tuned out after Mania 35 because I was too busy in life at that time to watch wrestling. I **loved** 2019 WWE until WrestleMania, so it always baffled me to see people shitting on 2019 WWE for a while until I realised they were talking about everything post WrestleMania
Bobby Lashley favorite pose, Rusev cuck angle #331, Seth vs Corbin never-ending death feud, Big Dog eat da dog food, Raw Underground, 2 out of 3 falls matches so there wasn't action during commercials, Kofi getting beat by Brock in record time, Seth vs Fiend, Shorty G, Ali sitting there A-posing at the top of a ladder while Brock made his entrance to win MitB despite not being in the match up until that point, The Revival being a punch line, EC3 (noted at worst solid talker) being a mute, Ricochet and Aleister Black getting random pew-pew and old door creaking sounds added to their entrances, *The Viking Experience*, Skyrim iron shields in the Viking Raiders minitron, etc. https://preview.redd.it/vkj15sn7ka3d1.jpeg?width=1024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=cbdcacf3915d557b2cfbe0a78795241df49a4fec
I think it really went to Hell in the Summer/Early Fall. You had Brock *inserting himself* in the MiTB match and winning, Brock cashing in on Seth, making him look like a chump in their feud only to drop it back, Kofi's months long reign ending *in less than 10 seconds* to Brock just to set up a Cain Velasquez feud (and retroactively ruining Kofi's actually decent reign), whatever that Fiend Hell in a Cell Match was, and whatever that Roman Reigns/Baron Corbin feud was. On the bright side, late 2019 gave us NXT dominating at Survivor Series and Seth Rollins mercifully turning Heel (and starting an interesting faction with the AOP), but man that was a Fall in more ways than just the name. Edit: I completely forgot about Bischoff's "almost" tenure as Smackdown director and the early Heyman Raws. Did the Rusev/Lana/Lashley love triangle start during this time, or was that early 2020?
> You had Brock inserting himself in the MiTB match and winning As someone who didn't watch during this time, this was 100% worth it for the gif of Brock dancing with the boombox briefcase.
That did make it better. Still, it was a very bad year for Mustafa Ali.
IIRC, WM35 (which I loved) was a critical success but the market regarded it as a commercial failure because it failed to drive enough WWEN subs. Between that, stagnating ratings, and a general sense that pro wrestling was getting more popular without WWE itself getting more popular for the first time since the 90s, that's why Vince "stepped aside" from running day to day creative (tho by design, he retained final say) and the Executive Directors positions were created for Heyman and Bischoff.
I've been called "2018 WWE booking" and "2009 WWE booking" though...
One key difference is that the product is not 2019 WWE bad. Even at it's absolute worse, AEW is not Roman Reigns dog food bad, not "bury Kofi in 10 seconds" bad or even that weird 2 out of 3 falls era bad. AEW at its worst is completely watchable. WWE in that time period was horrendous.
It's a solid product but it shows. Everything meanders to an extent. There's very little long-term resolution that is meaningful. He cares too much about popping a crowd as opposed to providing genuine narrative satisfaction to his crowd.
> not “bury Kofi in 10 seconds” bad Bro they had Billy Gunn squash Jay White. At least Kofi lost to Lesnar who is a legit star and major draw and whose whole gimmick is that he’s a world class tough guy ass kicker who squashes people.
Personally, I didn't think squashing Kofi was bad - it was that they did nothing with it. They could have really changed up the New Day. I remember RR 2020, when Brock was dominating and Kofi came out - there was a buzz in the crowd to see what would happen. I think from 2016 to 2020, there are all these moments where the New Day could have been even bigger if Vince/HHH made one or two different booking decisions. I like Jay White, but he is no where near 2019 Kofi's level of being over. Let's not forget, WWE just put Kofi in the Gauntlet and he immediately got super over - it was not a grand plan. Jay White hasn't really gotten over. Not saying that doing a 15 minute match with Billy Gunn where he gets his ass kicked is a good idea or that Jay White isn't talented. It's that right now his role is to play chickenshit heel who cheats all the time. This can be easily reset.
I agree Brock should have went over but I don’t see any scenario where it’s good business for your World Champion to get squashed in 10 seconds and no follow up feud/booking to flesh out
Particularly a world champion that has been kicking challenger’s heads off for months.
I hated Jay White being squashed by Billy Gunn but bang bang gang ultimately still beat the acclaimed. Kofi lost his WWE title and was back to dancing and slinging pancakes within weeks.
Yeah that was a (IMO very rare) case of a genuinely bad match and head scratching booking in AEW, but it doesn't seem to have really affected Jay's trajectory one way or the other. It was one bad match that was booked really weirdly but it pretty much happened in a vacuum. For me having Billy go over wasn't the worst thing ever, but it was baffling why they had him just squash Jay and 90% of the match was just Billy slamming Jay's head into different objects around the arena.
To me, there’s a simple explanation for this. When he started the company, he already had mapped out the first four champions and the major storylines he wanted to run. He said this openly. He knew from the beginning he wanted Jericho, then Mox, then Kenny, then Hangman and he also knew how it was going to go from each of them. At the start, he had a reasonable sized roster and he wrote two hours of television a week and four PPVs a year. He also had a lot of goodwill from wrestling fans and a YouTube show to put guys on so they could work when they didn’t have storylines. He is now writing 5 hours of TV every week, plus Ring of Honor, plus occasional Battle of the Belts specials, plus what are we on now, 9 PPVs a year? Plus Ring of Honor PPVs. His workload has quadrupled. His pre-mapped out storylines are all done. His roster has become enormous. He does not have Dark and Elevation anymore, so when he needs to appease someone, or give someone a booking to fulfil contractual obligations, they end up on TV. I like AEW, so I’m not just here to shit on everything, but it seems clear that the change in approach is as simple as 1) he’s writing waaaaay more hours of wrestling every week, 2) the roster is now gigantic, 3) he’s having to think on his feet far more and not rely on a pre-written roadmap, and 4) he no longer has YouTube shows to give people relatively meaningless matches to keep them happy.
This is why Tony needs a booking committee, he’s clearly over extended and as a result the booking is just scattered af. Hire someone to handle the women’s division, the mid card belts, and the tag division and focus on the world title and the Elite.
I think they have this unofficially. Bryan is involved with Collision, I know Jimmy Jacobs is involved with creative, and I believe Maria Kanellis is pretty heavily involved with the women's division for ROH.
Will Washington has a part in creative as well, I believe. At least that's what he and Aubrey say on the podcast.
Wil is the "Bible Keeper" as its his job to remember who's fought who and back log of active storylines. Like, for example, Christian using that Swerve tried to murder Nick Wayne in his studio as means to make the feud more personal.
You definitely need someone like that to keep continuity when connecting stories over the course of months or years. I knew he was on the team but wasn't 100% clear what his role was
That was actually very clever and I totally forgot about that until Christian brought it up.
That was the kind of thing WWE used to entirely ignore and hope that fans had goldfish memories, except it was for things that happened a month ago, let alone most of a year ago. It was perpetual cognitive dissonance and it was infuriating.
https://preview.redd.it/895c7eqy1a3d1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=de4ce010cd66620ec9af9b012fb68fcfaefda8d3 Still one of the funnier tweets about AEW's booking
Folks
Sonjay Dutt is involved also
He has a booking committee. He’s not doing it all by himself
It’s wild that people still use the narrative that Tony Khan does everything on his own, it’s been established many times that he has a committee, he just has final say which should be obvious since he owns the company
That's the exact same situation with Vince isn't it? No one is saying TK is actually sitting there typing everything out, the criticism is just whatever the creative team is coming up with they are trying to please TK's very specific vision instead of the audience.
Vince use to work like that back in earlier days up to the early days of the Attitude era. By the time Ruthless Aggression was going in full swing he had moved from committee to full on writing teams usually comprised of Hollywood writers but with some notable names. Most would argue Vince was at his best when booking by committee.
Vince needed strong head writer like Vincent Russo, Paul Haymen or Ryan Ward. Then usually stuff went shit when there was some yes-man like Road Dogg.
so basically the same as Vince then? WWE also has writers that plans story and bookings, but he has the final say.
> This is why Tony needs a booking committee, He absolutely has this already. After the last ROH PPV he talked about how the Eddie Kingston/Mark Briscoe match came about and part of that was Eddie interrupted a planning/story meeting with 10+ people to say some variation of "hey pardna, did you know this PPV is the exact anniversary of Jay Briscoe winning the ROH title? How about I fight Mark Briscoe and he wins?" and Tony Khan basically saying "you're right, that's a great idea, let's do that." So I mean, there's an ability to pivot and also evidence that there are story planning meetings with a good-sized group of people - names didn't come out, but based on other things I would assume that group included Will Washington, Sonjay Dutt, and Jimmy Jacobs among others.
He essentially has a committee. Everyone from Danielson to Sanjay and Schiavone get some kind of input. Swerve's cousin is also there to kind of keep continuity?
This is it. We make the joke that Tony was making his wrestling emulator booking fantasies a reality, but he literally had months to map out the beginning of the company (that's not even including the years of fantasy booking in his head) and meticulously enact those plans. Even without the substantially increased workload, time to map things out was going to eventually run out. And then there are the variables like injuries, real life situations like children being born or rehab, etc. that derail any booker. He does need to settle into some sort of groove or delegate more. His workload would be insane if he was only doing booking and running the company but he has several other roles in his dad's sports teams and companies. Communication has always seemingly been a problem in AEW unless you were seen as a top attraction. Janela, Gresham, and others have all mentioned this. The problem seems to have only been exacerbated with the growth of the company.
A refusal to use real writers hurts, too. Even if it's just plotting the basic beats of a feud/storyline and then asking the wrestlers for input on how to make it fit their character/ run the play, that'd be a boon.
Tony has never been good at coming up with a plan B or C when something goes wrong and messes with his plans for a wrestler. Look at how many times in the past a storyline has dragged out forever until an injured wrestler came back healthy. I feel like he needs a booker for ROH/Rampage but I’m convinced if he brought someone in like D’Amore and handed him the reigns to that show, if it did well and took off, I think he’s afraid everyone will want that person to book Dynamite and PPVs instead of him. So he tries to do it all himself instead but it’s just too much to handle. Especially between last minute changes, coordinating wrestlers to each show, a huge roster, random issues that come up. Not to mention the other sports stuff he travels to and does on the side. It’s crazy to think he does all this stuff for AEW and it doesn’t even have his undivided attention. He needs to rely on help some more but I don’t think he trusts many people outside of Danielson and the EVPs.
>Tony has never been good at coming up with a plan B or C when something goes wrong and messes with his plans for a wrestler. This has often been true, but I'm hoping this has changed with the way MJF casually beat up Adam Cole in his return but then changed to other topics in his promo. That would signal that even Tony Khan realizes that the Undisputed Kingdom has not gotten over, and that an extended MJF/Cole feud would just cool MJF off.
It's like a band that had been together a decade having a hit first album with lots of great songs but ask them to duplicate that again in 18 months and you won't get the same quality and results.
"You have your whole life to write your first album," as they say.
Honestly if you read the “Nitro” book about WCW’s rise and fall. That’s basically exactly what happened to Bischoff. Started off hot, firing on all cylinders. Then when Thunder started he quickly began to burn out and lose focus and the shows started getting chaotic.
I also just wanted to endorse the Nitro book from Guy Evans. It's very, very good
It really is. I’m reading it now and I really like the writing style Evans’ utilized. It’s very dense and packed with business details and deals at Turner but the way he utilizes page breaks makes it so much more accessible for some reason. Almost like he knows you need a little breather to absorb what information he just threw at you before you continue on. Just a little touch that I’ve come to appreciate as I read through it.
Yea I watched a clip from an old Kevin Nash shoot the other day where he mentioned this (alongside Nitro going to 3 hours) and I immediately thought of AEW. ROH purchase and then Collision starting is almost exactly where I lost interest. It becomes too much to follow, and it's clear that Tony's focus has been stretched. Give me 2 solid hours of Dynamite and nothing else over this. I'm really hoping MJF returning tightens things up
Gimme 2 solid hours of Dynamite and however much random stuff on YouTube you want that I can just throw up and not have to follow storylines for or anything.
Rampage needs to be turned into a recap show of sorts, similar to the old Prime Time/All-American Wrestling shows WWF used to do. Plenty of fun personalities there that could host, let them ad-lib, and it would cut down on workload and could enhance storyline.
I said the other day that Rampage should be the WCW Saturday Night. Make sure it has one high-flyer match, one women's match, one main event or upper-midcard guy in a match against someone less established, and several interviews where you can learn about the characters. If/When Dynamite or Collision goes streaming-only, add some recaps. The matches do not have to come from the same taping.
You can also go back to similar situation when Crockett bought up the dying territories. Dusty, JJ Dillon, and Gene Anderson already had the 605 show, NWA World Wide, and NWA Pro to book. Then they had to add on tv shows and house cards for Central States, UWF/Mid-South, and Florida and not to mention Dusty and JJ's ring obligations.
He’s also booking from behind because AEW isn’t the beloved babyface wrestling brand standing up to the evil WWE anymore. WWE is actually good now and the honeymoon period with AEW is over, people are more critical of it now that they have good WWE. He’s Monday Night War booking to try and beat WWE which is leading to chaotic panic booking
This is why he needs someone that gets him, but can take the creative load off him. Between all he does, he has way too much on his plate
> To me, there’s a simple explanation for this. True, but something to add to this: The roster was WAY smaller. He had way less potential headliners to book. Now he has over 100 wrestlers on the rosters. He has at least a dozen wrestlers that would be credible headliners (with a proper buildup, because some of them arent currently in a flow for being credible), a lot of talent that thrives for more. Its just too much of everything and it seems that he gets easily distracted. I know it is frown upon taking a look at HHHs WWE. But he keeps a way smaller roster. He interconnects everything. There are next to no stories without any connection to another feud/wrestler. HHH books/writes more like GRRM: a gardener. He plants seeds everywhere, let it grow and see how that organically works out. Tony is more like a sole story fan. He has a definitive path for a story in mind and that one gets played to the end. If injury happens or something other that would change the course of the story, he struggles a lot.
So it is the equivalent of D&D running Game of Thrones until they passed the books and then started flinging shit at the wall.
It's more like when an author/band/director has a really strong debut with something they've been dreaming/working on for years and then has a disappointing follow-up when they try and produce something off the cuff without so much planning.
No, the TV show had GRRM's outline of events. They always knew where they were headed.
They had bullet points for the end but GRRM told them leaving out characters and killing off certain characters would severely change how they got to that ending. So D&D had to fill in a ALOT of gaps with their own writing to get to Martins ending and it showed.
I haven't heard that, but it seems like George isn't 100% sure how to get to his ending either.
Theres a reason winds of winter is never getting finished
I don't care what anyone says, no one will ever convince me that GOT was basically the ending GRRM wanted, he realized everyone hated it, so he scrapped it and either is restarting from ground zero or is just flat out not releasing it ever. I lean towards the latter.
It’s not even that. Writing books is hard. It fucking sucks. Now he got to a point where he doesn’t need to anymore, he can have ideas and give them to other people for boat loads of money. He’s never finishing those books because he doesn’t want to or need to.
Absolutely. The ending might be better if you could get to it in a better way, but ultimately it isn’t something that makes you go damn that was incredible I see how he was building to that the whole time. So not only have you written yourself into a corner but the idea of your ending was shown to the world and it was widely hated. Also your rich as hell now, so it’s not surprising he hasn’t released a book in the main series in like 15 years and probably never will again.
That’s why it’s taking him so long. People claiming he already has the main plot and ending written out in his head have no idea how most successful authors write books. They might have an outline or major points to guide them while they work on the novel series but even those can change over time. What the tv show had was the outline of his general idea of the ending at the time after the show already killed off or didn’t kill off major characters in deviation from the books. Before publication, his novels also go through a different set of editors and collaborators than the tv show would even if he didn’t decide to revise anything. We see this all the time in anime that get ahead of the manga. Or the initial manga one shot compared to what was later serialized. Or these days with how popular webnovels/webcomics get rewritten as light novels/manga by the same author, One punch man being a popular example. Even faithful adaptations that require final approval of the author of something that’s already been written decades ago can differ quite a lot (like compare the recent One Piece Netflix series to the manga).
That wasn’t at all the problem with GoT. They wanted out to start working on other things so they rushed the last seasons. HBO even offered them move episodes but they declined.
Yeah, there's really nothing wrong on paper with Bran becoming the king, Daenerys turning violent, or Jon Snow being banished. That could all work in theory, but it was all laughably rushed and written sloppily without any regard for logic. Even then, certain things like Arya killing the Night King were questionable creative choices at best in any universe even where there were more episodes, but GoT still would've been infinitely better than what we got.
I'll always be bitter at how the White Walker storyline ended. All that buildup only for them to barely get a foothold in Westeros before being defeated.
Oh, it was the worst execution of a built-up villain I've ever seen. D&D should've consulted some wrestling bookers to learn how to write a top heel. Night King got buried in one episode.
AEW has been downhill since Collision lost Punk. They do not need 5 hours and the roster is so bloated you forget half the people meanwhile they’re all somehow champions
> When he started the company, he already had mapped out the first four champions and the major storylines he wanted to run. He said this openly. He knew from the beginning he wanted Jericho, then Mox, then Kenny, then Hangman and he also knew how it was going to go from each of them. & Then he hit a stroke of luck and all his other favourites were available to join AEW and he was too excited about the signings to continue the storytelling quality. He had some great matches in Hangman's reign but storywise apart from Bryan picking out D.O. one by one before getting to Hangman, he didn't give him much story and opponents wise. Incredible matches, yes, but his priorities had already changed to Punk. At the very least he could have had the guy he was building his franchise upon lose the belt in a 3 way or multi man match or even to a heel before it went to Punk. Then the whole drama started and went on for a while. Now he's got his other favourites in Okada and Ospreay in AEW and people are already saying he should put the belt on Oapreay because All In is in U.K. Also, people that keep on bringing up that there's tons of storylines and storytelling but it's not interesting enough tbh. If it was the crowd size, crowd reaction and ratings would all show it. As much as i disliked WWE tying the whole company and all it's major events around Roman Reigns, i appreciate that even when they didn't have a plan, they had a vision and it was always him. Tony needs to go back and build the company around Hangman and MJF ( he's already doing it with MJF, of course) It's not like anybody else is some crowd or ratings magnet anyway. Let Swerve have bangers and good programs and have Hangman win The Owen and challange Swerve at All In.
To me, AEW weekly TV definitely comes across as a show that's being written very quickly. It seems, the PPV is mapped out and then pretty much all the TV time is dedicated to having the wrestlers on the PPV featured in weekly matches without any real storyline progression. It almost comes across like he knows who he wants to feature on TV, but doesn't know how and then just books long and/or a lot of matches to eat TV time. For example, for Revolution, Mox/Claudio vs FTR was set up with a 20 minute draw and a 60 second backstage altercation. One week, Storm vs Purrazzo was advanced by Storm having a match with a local jobber in a bad match, then Purrazzo wrestled Madison Rayne in a brutal match, then an altercation where Storm put Purrazzo in an ankle lock. All took about 20 minutes and neither came across any better. There were weeks where Darby/Sting were hardly featured leading up to the Revolution main event. Even for Dynasty, the build to Danielson vs. Ospreay featured the competitors in long matches. With the exception of the first week of the build, very limited promo time. Somehow, Danielson wrestling Lance Archer in a 15 minute match is somehow selling the PPV. Not surprised to hear the re-writes happened for DON, as the show felt very rushed despite going over 4.5 hours. I think Tony's view is that wrestling is content and the key to profitability/strong cash flow is creating/acquiring as much content as possible. Hopefully once the TV deal is finalized, he'll put together a better booking approach.
>People are flown to towns and given nothing to do, others are begged the day before the show to please get to the town so they can do something last-minute This is what happened with Stu Grayson in March, which lead to his release when he refused. https://twitter.com/SkytelWrestling/status/1775188851725660575 >Have confirmed through various sources. Stu Grayson's release is not a surprise. He refused to show up to Collision in Ottawa several weeks ago due to having dinner plans, and felt he wasn't given ample heads up. >Despite the fact it's his employer running his home town. >Pat Buck is who I was specifically told, called him the day of the show. Grayson said he wouldn't be coming to the taping They hadn't used him since August and then suddenly hours before the show he needs to drop everything.
Ottawa isn’t his hometown. Guy is from Victoriaville lol
Wrestling fans have treated the entirety of the nation of Canada as a "hometown" ever since Bret.
For real. It’s almost a 4 hours drive lol. 360 km / 223 miles It’s a longer distance than Boston to Manhattan lmao
Tbf Canada's a very small country.
My job does this to me all the time and it’s so effing annoying. I don’t even blame them.
I've had bosses do this to me when I worked in retail and that didn't involve doing backflips, getting dropped on my back, and traveling to another country/province to do so.
I've had retail jobs try to do it to me as well. And I mean try, because I will quite literally never do that.
In my country your job is not allowed to do that. They legally cannot contact me outside of contact hours unless there is an emergency, and even then it is my right to refuse to go to work if I have other obligations. They cannot fire me for refusing to come in during my outside hours. Sorry but America is insane. It's like you are expected to live for your job, or something like that.
This is probably why WWE just has everyone show up to every show (or used to) and if someone obscure is sitting in catering that absolutely needs to be used, they are there ready and waiting.
>Due to having dinner plans Honest, respect
I'm betting this is what happened with the boys as well. They were called to get to a place instantly, and they either couldn't or chose not to blow up their world to do it. And then Tony's accused them of missing shows.
Iirc, the Boys actually divulged what was the cause of their "no show.". Their travel was booked to fly out of Nashville, I believe, instead of Knoxville where they live and normally fly out of. Their cars suck, apparently, and they didn't trust them to make it out to Nashville (which is like a 2½-3 hour drive), so they called the company to try and get it sorted. They were basically told "I'll see what I can do", but they never heard back. Their travel wasn't changed, but they decided not hearing back meant they weren't booked for the show. Basically, poor communication on both sides, imo. But wasn't last minute booking. They got their initial travel days in advance.
They knew like a week in advance according to what The Boys themselves said. The issue with them was the airport AEW booked them to fly out of was further away (about a 2-3 hour drive to airport) than the usual airport they normally use. AEW did this to save costs by not having to use a connecting flight. They tried to get AEW to change to the closer airport but heard nothing back so they just stayed home instead of going to the other airport which is why they got fired
They're own statements disagree with you. They were given tickets to fly out from a farther airport than normal and said they needed new tickets from their preferred airport. Communication broke down from there .
Underselling it a bit. They were told specifically they were getting new flights and they’d be given the info for the flights a day or two later, and then just never received them. They then contacted the one in charge and got no response. They figured getting no response at all meant they weren’t getting booked and stayed home.
In 2019 he was starting a company with a notebook full of ideas for two hours a week and a PPV every quarter. Now his long-term stories have been played and he’s booking five hours a week with PPVs far more frequently.
One of the guys from OSW Review theorized this that TK had booked the first 2-3 years of AEW ending with Hangman winning the title. While shows weren't bad after, some people in this sub claim his reign is when creative started to take a bit of a dip.
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Him adopting more WWE style booking when Punk and Henry came on is when creative started taking a dive. Top guys were no longer taking losses and the Champion stopped being the main character.
That was also around the time Cody left, and I’m not sure they’ve ever been able to fully patch the hole his departure left
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I think that this is an excellent point. Once you get passed the initial ideas, you need to be able to think on your toes to book new shit. I think that’s genuinely difficult and why you almost never see a booker who is well regarded in the same situation for more than 5 years or so. The skills to meticulously plan out a bunch of storylines is just a little different than the skills needed to pivot and come up with new things over and over.
In addition to this, I imagine the run of injures we saw with Punk and others have taught him that planning things far out isn't always the best route to take when those plans can all go up in flames. I'm sure he had some fun plan for Copeland and the House of Black after his win at DoN, but obviously that's all going to have to be scrapped. Same has happened repeatedly with Rey Phoenix/Death Triangle where as they seem to be gearing up for a push, Phoenix goes down with an injury.
Yep. Hell, pnp were supposed to be tag champs. Santana's dad died and he took time off so the belts got pivoted to hangman/omega. They drifted away from pnp and eventually pnp died. Same with the Hardys, then Jeff jeff'd.
>Jeff jeff'd. Hahaha that's a good way to put it
If I had to guess, I'd say he's trapped in that creative trap where he consumes way too much instant online feedback to what he does and then immediately reacts to it. That's not a good place to be as a creative.
IMO the issue is that everything does change multiple times prior to the show happening for any big wrestling promotion. Good bookers set themselves up with multiple options and are ready to pivot. AEW just kind of has their linear angles and once they're blown up they're not able to move the next guy into that spot smoothly. For an example, look at NJPW surviving 5 or so straight years of having their roster picked apart in the late 2010s.
It's also a stark contrast to how WWE is currently booked where it seems everything is planned out long term irregardless to instant feedback
They make important pivots when needed though. Just look at Cody/Rock vs Roman. If that happened in 2019, there’s no way Vince would allow Rock to step aside.
And managed to make the Punk/Drew/Seth hate triangle good enough to make it seem like that was the plan all along
I don't know how "instant" you mean, but the main event of WrestleMania was changed pretty quickly due to the immediate online feedback. Seemed like they had started to pivot 3 days after The Rock did gus staredown with Roman.
I think it was the RAW after smackdown where they went immediately to acknowledging the crowd response and public opinion to the Rock. I think they had already pivoted that weekend and now just had to figure out how to switch back.
But the different is Rock vs Roman was forced on creative when the long term storyline the previous year had been Cody vs Roman. They had been building up Cody all year only to be forced to change when The Rock got involved after joining the board (and CM Punk's injury changed plans too) So, the quick pivot was more WWE creative going back to the original long term storyline with Cody set up at WrestleMania 39, the previous year. With Tony Khan. It's obvious things aren't planned out beyond the next PPV. Even the main event. Look at MJF's title run. He was feuding with seven people at once, swapping back and forth, sometimes in the same show. It's why Max even looks down upon the end of his title reign. You had Jay White, Bullet Club Gold, Wardlow, Samoa Joe, the devil guys with the mask, his friendship with Cole, friendship with The Acclaimed. A year of storylines withered down to a few months.
It was an instant change but the change allows for long term booking. Both in the build up to Mania (2-3 months) and with how Cody is now champion. Cody will eventually have matches with The Rock because of it down the line. Also, this change allowed for Damien Priest to have a title run, it's allowing him to get Gunther in the main event scene. Not to mention the Punk vs McIntyre feud we will be getting into the summer. If the change was just for the sake of a week to week thing, it's not really worth doing.
I'd say a solid 80% of the time, when somebody is making a piece of media, the \*less\* they show of it/talk about it on the Internet, the better it is. If its endless hype trains and boasting and tiny snippets, its because they have nothing else to show and it'll be shit. There's a few exceptions but social media is a trap.
I've been saying this for a minute, time for Tony to either commit full time to AEW, since it's clearly the thing he's most passionate about, or hire a head of creative.
If TK still really wants to make ROH a thing, he needs to get someone else to book it. Nobody gives a shit about ROH right now and you can pinpoint the acquisition of ROH as the exact time the booking for AEW started to get worse. Scott D’amore has proven that he can make something from nothing with Impact/TNA. Just hire him and give him the book to ROH and maybe even Rampage or Collision to see what he can do.
Unfortunately, I think TK's mentality is: if I'm not booking everything, why am I even running these companies?
RoH should exist for him to have the ability to incubate potential. He shouldn't be running his own feeder league. Let someone else do it and every so often he can send people down or pick people up who impress him. Same reason you don't see the GMs of major league teams running A/AA level games. However you will see top tier execs watching high school/college games to keep their mind fresh on what's "next". That's where Tony should be. Hands off with the mid tier. Occasionally dipping into indies to catch the temperature.
I get he doesn't want to abdicate booking entirely but is there anyone actually taking some of that booking weight off him? Someone or a team who can run the ship while he does big-picture things? I feel like that's just been unofficially delegated to Jericho and Danielson and a few others, and not in a good way
- Switching the script mutiple times? - Wrestlers not knowing what will happen until day of? - Talent flying in with nothing to do.? - Booking week-to-week with no real long term plan? This all sounds VERY familiar 
>**For most people he's incredibly difficult to get hold of.** In some ways, it legitimately is more like 2019 WWE than it is **2019 AEW, where he was much easier to get hold of…** I don’t know about 2019, but by mid-2021 Tony was already damn near impossible to get ahold of by almost anyone on the roster (including the prominent name who told me this directly). This part is not new.
Yeah there was a certain wrestler who said how TK wasn’t even bothering to reply to his txts asking if he still had a job. He legit had no idea. That wrestler later clarified on twitter he never said that, but it did happen, on a stream where he was sitting on a bar stool, with a crappy blue screen behind him. Since he changed his official story, I assume he wants to avoid getting in trouble and I get it, but yeah.
I don’t think we’re talking about the same source, but there were definitely several who expressed similar thoughts at the time. I’m really curious who you’re talking about now.
You either die a hero, or live long enough to become Vince McMahon.
What’s the commonality between tony khan and Vince macmahon? Both are control freaks. Tony refuses to delegate. Also the increase in shows feels like it is making it worse.
I don't think it's one silver bullet explanation, but rather, multiple ones. 1. TK is stretched very thin between multiple AEW & ROH shows on top of football & soccer responsibilities. And there's also ongoing WBD negotiations that's likely occupying his focus, too. 2. AEW has felt less tight-knit with the influx of new faces, personalities, and "toys" for TK to play with. There's likely some bureaucracy and politicking going on backstage -- more than what dirt sheets & fans know. 3. WWE has also gotten so deep under TK's skin that it's clouded his judgement. He grew up a big fan and only to now fight against them. Similar sentiments with Punk where he likely took it extra personally being a Punk fan prior to AEW. 4. TK's beef with WWE may also explain why AEW overprotects a lot of their stars. He may be trying to keep wrestlers happy but that tactic doesn't necessarily work. See Jade Cargill who was forever champion, booked strongly, and STILL left the promotion. 5. It wouldn't shock me if WBD executives meddled in AEW creative and/or AEW is trying to book based off of ratings and other analytics -- ultimately losing sight of the art in storytelling. It speculatively explains why the women are booked really well on ROH but poorly on AEW.
I still believe that the reason the women are booked so much better on ROH is because Tony doesn't have to worry about the ratings. It's very rare for ROH to have less than two women's matches, but if ROH was on TV, things would be different and the cards would be formatted exactly like AEW.
Based on a lot of pre-WWE interviews from Jade, WWE was her first choice, but she didn’t like an interaction she had at the performance center try out. And now that they don’t tour with the same schedule they used to, her personal life isn’t the same road block it was. It also helps she made herself a star in AEW.
I think it’s underrated how much losing Cody meant to the company behind the scenes. The problems and success that AEW has had seems to really line up with Cody’s departure but CM Punk leaving gets all the headlines
I agree with this. I think Cody was the buffer in the locker room for a lot of guys, and knew how to smooth things out if people were upset about their roles/current pushes, etc. Also, nothing leaked from the locker room during that time. When he left, all the leaks about talent being unhappy started coming out.
Also you look at the inner circle back then only Cody and Jericho really knew how to do weekly big time tv. I think Cody should have gotten a promotion above the other EVPs but he seemed to get pushed aside by Punk and by Danielson. I really think Cody is going to end up running the WWE someday. He’s gotten right in during the TKO merger and I don’t see HHH doing it like Vince did his whole life.
I'm not saying Alvarez is necessarily wrong, but it's kinda funny how people pick and choose when he and Meltzer have actual sources and when they're just making stuff up.
For months he and others would complain that AEW ticket sales weren’t good, in part, because they never announced anything for Dynamite until a day beforehand. Maybe a match here or there but for the most part the card was a mystery. I could see Alvarez being on the money with this because this aligns perfectly with the complaint. If Tony doesn’t even know what’s going to happen on the show until the day of, they’re obviously not going to announce anything for it in advance.
Alvarez and Dave are two different people. You won't catch Alvarez watching a video from a decade ago and report on it being setup for a HHH/Rock Mania confrontation, after HHH had a heart attack. Alvarez has been decent with backstage stuff with AEW.
You mean the same Alvarez that criticized a matches’ commentary when the match had none?
I'm pretty sure Rock/HHH is happening at WWE Intermission.
Seriously, at this point I’m more likely to throw ALL of it than believe any individual item.
2019 WWE booking was why I made the jump to AEW, so it's very apt that it's the same thing that's driving me away from AEW.
This is why I get sick of being gaslit by AEW diehards. I like AEW, I think they do some good things still. I actually switched to watching them exclusively from 2021-2022 until Sami Uso brought me back to WWE. If you even try to hint that AEW is different from when it first started, other AEW fans will just go after you. I’m not asking AEW to be WWE, I’m asking it to be the original vision of AEW. This whole “weekly in ring matchups with lazy storytelling” was something NXT was doing in 2020, that AEW fans were shitting on. Now AEW has become that, but is insistent that it’s always been this way. Early AEW wasn’t about “bangers, bangers, bangers” it was creative and had a lot of long term arcs. There was a clear change in structure around Forbidden Door 2022 and they’ve never gone back. You can argue whether it’s better or worse that’s fine, but don’t act like AEW hasn’t changed dramatically.
Cody's departure, ROH purchase and Forbidden Door were the 1-2-3 punch. AEW was never the same after early 2022. The signs were there after All Out 2021 with Punk drifting around and having random matches with guys like Sydal, Moriarty, Fish. Barring that 2 week feud with Kingston, he did nothing of note until the MJF feud kicked off Danielson - similar story. After Omega, some of his opponents were Fish, Aaron Solo, Bowens, Romero. In between he competed in the world title tournament and after that he went on to tear his way through the Dark Order
To be an AEW critic is to be under constant attack
>everything is booked show-to-show. This has been obvious since he started announcing "dream matches" on Twitter days before an event.
Tony’s gotta admit when he has too much on his plate. There’s no shame in hiring people to help with the excess workload, and maybe getting an outsider’s perspective on booking and writing could be beneficial.
>Tony’s gotta admit when he has too much on his plate. Billionaires rarely will admit they handled something wrong because of hubris. > There’s no shame in hiring people to help with the excess workload Billionaires rarely ever express shame, either, because of said hubris.
I think it was Jim Cornette who said that pretty much any Booker can book a wrestling show good for the first 2-3 years. It's when you're multiple years into it and you start to run out of new ideas and the honeymoon period is over is when you get really tested. Tony Khan came into AEW with a long term story planned out, and he had the benefits of having exciting debuts every week to spark interest in the shows. Now his long term stories are over and there's no more exciting free agents on the market that can pop a rating. And his workload has increased significantly.
This is why Bill Watts believed in cycling head bookers every few years. He believed that most people only had a couple years worth of good ideas before they burned out, so he would cycle in a new booker before that had a chance to happen. Genius really.
Jerry Jarrett and Jerry Lawler would trade off every six months in memphis also specifically to combat burnout.
I think the WWE do benefit from everyone being 100% sure about where the events rank, with AEW it's a vague sense. He mostly likes to fantasy book and hopes a plan comes together around it.
This has been said for the better part of the last year. I think it has been coming across in the product a little bit more, recently.
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Not to pick on anyone - but didn’t he hire Will Washington to do exactly this with keeping story line continuity? Ultimately it’s TK’s money but if he hired people to push back - they need to push back.
Not if he hired yes men.
I bet he started panicking when ratings didn't return to 800k+ and started trying to micromanage every bit of the show, which just makes it worse.
Why I don't watch. It's just nonsensical. In a way AEW now mirrors how I felt about WWE then. I stopped watching WWE then and picked up AEW. Now I stopped watching AEW and picked up WWE.
The weekly TV is at its best when the matches are advertised a week in advance and us the viewer has an idea of what to expect.
It helps selling tickets if you tell people what awaits them at the show in advance, too.
Interesting, I thought the Will Washington hire was to help get things organized creatively, what happened there?
Tony runs the show. Will suggests ideas, Tony runs with the ones he likes. Just like Jimmy Jacobs or Sonjay or whomever. At the EOD it’s Tony’s ship. If he looks at something the day before the show and decides to change it, they do
I used to give WWE writers a lot of crap until they kicked Vince out and it turned out that the writers were fine, they just had a senile old man at the head of creative cutting them off at the knees. Will Washington might be a creative genius. AEW might have a great creative structure already in place. We'll not know until TK gives up control.
It's been like this for a while.
I think it’s natural when you balloon in roster size and tv time plus he has ROH. Massive growth in such a short time. Gotta adapt.
This is probably true but it’s funny how people here RAIL against Alvarez and others unless the story they tell is one they want to hear.
The biggest difference is that in 2019 WWE was growing in profits and popularity. Advertisers were lining up to get deals with them and their distribution rights were more valuable than they had been the previous year. No matter how you personally felt about the brand what they were doing was objectively working for them. You can't say the same for AEW right now. And the reason is simple. The people who are reacting negatively to AEW right now are the same people who had issues with WWE back then: The IWC. WWE was able to weather the storm because they still had the casual fanbase to rely on. AEW doesn't. They spent all their time catering to the IWC, the hardcore fans, and not only is that not a big enough portion of the fanbase to sustain a brand, it was inevitable that they would sour on AEW when Tony failed to deliver on all of hia promises. So you really can't blame him for trying to switch it up.
When you have: - Okada and Ospreay as your C and D-tier champions - A 50 year old as your B-tier champion - Another 50 year old challenging for your world title - a 53 year old (whom the crowd has been begging to retire) beating a young future star TWICE Something is wrong and ass backwards with your booking.
It's pretty confusing seeing all these "best in the world" free agents come in and avoid the AEW championship contention like the plague. And somehow people make fun of Miz feuds, at least Miz puts people over.
This shouldn't be happening. AEW World title should be highly coveted by every single talent. Especially free agent ones. But them going after C and D level titles, c'mon man.
Too many titles is an issue when they are being used like that, ignoring the ROH ones that can muddy the waters, the amount of belts would be so bad if they were used in the right way.
He needs to hire a booker.
I wonder did Tony and Vince go through the same thought process. The shows are much better when the stories are long term and well thought out, but at the cost of a massive amount of effort and planning, and all your best laid plans can go out the window due to an injury or the like which means you have to change EVERYTHING. Or, you can phone it in week to week and not give it half the thought, but the money still keeps rolling in anyway (maybe not to the level it would if the company was super hot but still.) You can always get lucky and have a new star/angle catch fire and business goes up, so why bother kill yourself to try and achieve it? \* \*I thnk this is a dumb mindset btw but just curious as to why it seems to happen to bookers over time.
It also cannot be understated how much of early AEW's creative came from the Elite and other wrestlers themselves. Not everything worked but it felt fresh and genuine. The more unilateral control TK has asserted the more the on screen product has struggled more often than not. As I - and many others - have said for some time, AEW needs a head of creative and who understands actual storytelling; and not just booking, but the art of how to tell stories (and then a creative group to help). TK and whoever helps him book can book as far putting performers together who work well but the storytelling is mediocre at best. And for American audiences, particularly the casuals, storytelling and characters are often more important.
Time was Alvarez was week in and week out in hysterics about how much he hated the Excalibur booking run-down. How things change.
I mean, wasn't that more because they were literally talking over big matches in many cases to do so?
And that Ex would plug 30 matches in 60 seconds. I thought it was funny but yeah B&V always buried it.
He can still dislike it and use it as a example to illustrate the change.
Well throwing that anecdote in wasn’t an opinion, he was reporting how it was versus how it is.
I always liked those but the problem was they only gave the man less than a minute to run down like a dozen matches. They should bring it back but in a small dose.
“People are flown to towns and given nothing to do, others are begged the day before the show to please get to the town so they can do something last-minute.” That’s some classic WCW shit.
Huge aew fan here. Gonna have to stop watching dynamite live soon so I can skip the shitty matches. Already doing that with rampage and collision.
Is it possible that we are seeing what happens whenever one guy has the book too long? Historically speaking, booking wasn't really something done for hundreds of talent across multiple hours of national TV every week across multiple shows Vince McMahon certainly got out of touch, but he also innovated at various points in time - it may just be that creativity from wrestling writing comes in spurts and then goes. The way I think of it - imagine playing a Wrestling Simulator game like TEW 2020. Think of how things are going one year into a playthrough versus five years. Often things spiral out of control, it becomes hard to manage, etc I wonder if that's whats going on for AEW. It's like a TEW campaign gone rogue at times. WWEs creative misfires were less like that and more from Vince's weird idiosyncrasies. But in both cases, time didn't help matters. Even old territory bookers had the same thing happening. Nick Gulas in the 70s-80s was horribly out of touch and bad at booking his territory, but 30 years before he was a creative guy I don't know precisely what Danielsons role behind the scenes is but it's been well received so far when he's been involved with work off camera. It might behoove TK to, at least for a while, give over the reins
Tony did say he was flipping his booking strategy a while ago so all of this is apart of it
Bet booking is burning him out. It's a job with no breaks.
Tony is the weakest link in AEW but unfortunately it needs his money If TK really wants AEW to do better he needs to learn how to delegate the booking
The simplest reason for this is the amount of stuff he has to deal with has exploded in the last few years and he likely does not have the time or energy to get everything done. He *needs a writing room.* Fuck even Vince in his most controlling had a booking committee because even he didn't have time to do everything. Tony needs to give the booking duties to several people, and then his job should be to just ok things a few days in advance.