Overall Evaluation and Achieved Goals
Fun characters, intriguing progression, and confrontations to look forward to… a lot of work goes into making it click, but when you break it down like that it doesn’t seem so complicated.
Life has been a drag. Nice to have something fun, even if it remains silly in the middle of a pandemic and whatnot. The product defects are less, “Wow, why? What? Does life have anyone in control that is not a monster?” and more “Hey! They should use that guy more often.”
Areas of Excellence Within Performance
One of the critiques of AEW early on was their matches were too long and tried to draw the viewer in more with fancy dives than straight-up story. With personalities now developed up and down the card and TV matches more to the point, that critique is mostly dead.
Eddie Kingston/PAC was filled with great selling both exhaustion-wise and in Eddie’s case goofball-wise.
Kenny Omega & The Good Brothers vs. Danny Limelight & The Varsity Blondes began with an (actually) great swerve in the Brothers replacing the Young Bucks, and ended up a fun TV squash with Limelight looking about 10x better here than in NJPW STRONG.
The Darby Allin/Brian Cage main event for the TNT Title was wild, a match that made Darby Allin an even bigger deal though he was getting destroyed the entire time. Those Mike Awesome/Spike Dudley ECW matches weren’t five-star classics, but they built out that world better than any classic could.
MJF ran that entire Inner Circle‘s New Year’s Resolutions segment like a seasoned sports entertainer, though everybody was on point: having a good time, but just a little paranoid.
Really happy someone decided they should use “butler” instead of “young boy” for the Miro/Chuck Taylor angle – Japanese wrestling history is cool, but using the term “young boy” on American television is not. Love Chuckie T in a ridiculous angle like this, and Miro is just having a blast.
Britt Baker was magic on The Waiting Room, balancing a bunch of wrestling in-jokes with just being entertaining for all humans. Someone at WWE is going to get fired when Vince finds out they’re doing the old school WWF talk show setup better than him.
Suggested Areas of Improvement
I like the idea of Lance Archer, but I haven’t been able to follow AEW’s approach with him since he lost to Cody.
Remember when NXT would really focus on how clever FTR (The Revival) was being with their tag work? AEW should do that again.
My Favorite Things
2. The fact that PAC is the only guy in AEW who ahs pinned Kenny Omega
1. Darby beats Cage with the crucifix cradle that Taz tried to lecture him on six months ago
