Well they have three weeks to build for Worlds Collide and I have zero idea what the show will look like. There is one match announced - Imperium vs. UE - so it seems like there won’t be a world title match on the show.
Nobody watches NXT UK and we just saw basically anyone who had any value get squashed on Survivor Series or on TV leading up to SS. If they spend all this time building up NXT UK against AEW then I’m not sure they will be doing all that hot on ratings but I guess we’ll see.
Selfishly I hope they build a lot for the NXT Portland show anyways since I’m going.
I largely agree, they have done a good job spotlighting some UK talent on NXT recently (Walter v Kushida, Kay Lee Ray at War Games) but poorly on the main roster. I preferred worlds collide as a tournament (maybe it still is that plus UE vs Imperium) where the winner gets a title shot of their choice. I think that would be the best use as it gives a good platform to spotlight some guys with good matches without the need for a lot of story going in.
The matches were good but none of it related to any storylines going on. If you missed that episode, you would’ve missed nothing. They could’ve recorded some promos, interviews, done an angle or two and then get people excited for the following episode where they’d be going head to head again. They didn’t even try to make it resemble a proper NXT show. Then they followed up with an awards show.
NXT were in a great spot after the December 18th show but they’ve been lazy with what they’ve done for the 2 shows following that. Good work undone. It’ll be interesting to see how they do when they put on a proper show again. Hopefully they promote it and let people know that it’s actually going to be an episode of NXT this week.
I thought this week was terrible, last week was fine though plenty of NXT shows are similar, it introduced 2 new characters and built up a few others. It wasn’t the best show, but it on its own was fine. This week was terrible, wrestlers getting awards in an empty arena. If there were not going to be fans they should have done those awards in a studio setting. To me it kind of felt like they should have split up the matches from last week and the awards (if they were not doing a live show) and had a bit of each on both shows. They still wouldn’t have been amazing shows but this week was such a throw away show.