John Pollock and Wai Ting review AEW Dynamite featuring Jon Moxley vs. Joey Janela.
Wednesday’s episode saw the slow build towards Chris Jericho and Jon Moxley continue. In the main event, it was a rematch from Fyter Fest between Moxley and Joey Janela, Pentagon Jr. and Christopher Daniels finally had their match, a big upset within the women’s division, The Young Bucks teamed with Dustin Rhodes against the Inner Circle, the Nightmare Collective is introduced, and Cody tries to convince MJF to have a match.
I think it is fair to criticize AEW for lack of features on the Lucha Bros at this point and if you were a new fan in week 1 and have all these unanswered questions are they still watching
Unlike our podcast hosts, I thought this episode of Dynamite was better than some of late, and much better than last week.
But listening to this podcast here (and elsewhere), I’m struck by how reviewers have been trained by WWE to expect certain things. And many viewers too, by looking at the comments in forums.
AEW is doing some things differently (not enough IMO) and at the top of the list is that AEW is not doing DQ’s and f*ck-finishes. This means wrestlers have to lose. Even your top ranked talent has to lose. That so many podcasters/reviewers are struggling with talent losing matches tells me that WWE has had a near-monopoly (on major network wrestling) for so long that even the reviewers have been programmed to expect that losing a match is some disaster.
Also, the complaint that there is not enough back-material. Well, Dynamite is a show with 86 minutes of material per week. So there will be weeks when some talent just doesn’t show up, and while AEW has not used their promo time as efficiently as they could, the reality is that TV time is limited enough to simply constrict what will be accomplished.
I get much more out of wrestling as entertainment if I don’t try to fantasy book it. I accept that AEW have their stories and just go with it. The parts I don’t like (such as A.K. and B.R. cutting hair) I just skip through on the DVR.
To me the problem isn’t as much that there is no back material, it is that they book dynamite as though everyone knows all the side material they put out. So they act like there are storylines that people know about when they really don’t.
The whole purpose of ratings is to show advertisers the amount of people watching live. The more people watching live, the more they are forced to watch the ads. DVR viewers are most certainly skipping the ads and offer no value to advertisers. Ratings also don’t judge how good or bad a show actually was.
I agree. With the long gaps in between PPV’s it’s going to be hard to maintain the No.1 contendership or any kind of winning streak. There will be exceptions to this but I don’t have a problem with Shida losing her match last night.
AEW is still a very young company and they are going to have “growing pains” and I think they’re fine with that.
Wai and John mentioning the possible lack of communication between the talents and the fact that some segments are similar. That’s the problem with their system. It seems like everybody does his own thing and then they throw that on TV.
While over nights are king, advertisers apparently do care about DVR. Listening to Wade Keller he was remarking on his Dynamite review that there is research showing that a lot of people watching DVR are not Fast Forwarding commercials. Now they may be using them to go get a snack but that is true in live TV as well.
