Lanza uploaded his review late so I uploaded my commentary late. Don’t come at me with “his was done three days ago” either. I’m taking off my shoe and I will throw it. Do you want the commentary or not?
This will be a bit more thorough than the review I did for this episode. I did watch the show, even though that review doesn’t really show it. There is also a fairly in-depth reprise focusing on the idea of “hate and heat”.
Joe talks ratings, cyclical trends.
The cycles of wrestling is something that Joe talks about a lot but I want to push back on this. I think there is something to the idea of cycles, but you can’t rely on cycles to tell you what’s going on entirely. To me, the “cycles” aspect really has to do with details that are outside of wrestling. AEW’s fall right now has less to do with wrestling being on a downcycle or even AEW itself being on a downcycle than with AEW just being bad. It’s not a compelling show.
Joe talks about being disappointed in the matches, wanting fireworks, minimalism in punditry, wanting bangers.
I’m going to expand on this more later, but one thing that I think people have really lost sight of is that people like to see great action. On the minimalism aspect, I personally consider myself a minimalist a lot of times so I’d like to see what Lanza is talking about here, I’ll have to try and hunt some stuff down.
Joe talks about the opening tag and Page attack, Moxley asking for the four-way match, fatal four-way.
I honestly cackled when Moxley said “fatal four-way” cause I knew Joe would hate it. I’m one of the people who’s unbothered by those particular WWE-isms; fatal four-way is a bit corny but I have never minded “triple threat”. Agree in general about the match though. I disagree on Moxley’s motivations, at least as far as the match itself goes. I think the idea behind Mox is that he’s trying to prove that whatever he’s doing is better than what anybody else is. In his mind, he’s the babyface, and he’s willing to fight anybody because he thinks he will definitely win, or maybe losing will prove something, etc. Whatever the exact explanation from Mox would be, I felt this fit his character. I do agree that the end goal of the Death Riders is just nothing at this point and that’s a problem for them. That said, it’s not like any other company takeover story had a point, either. I certainly can’t remember any. It was mostly just that whoever was “winning” got to do what they wanted, nobody tried to get anything specific. That’s why all of these angles feel corny and why they always have.
Joe talks about Excalibur trying to weave together a Team AEW narrative.
Very related to the fact that the Death Riders don’t have a clear goal, I think. If there was something that the Death Riders actually wanted that they didn’t have, you could at least say each person was trying to stop that. As it is, the only thing that “stopping the Death Riders” means is that at the eventual match, Team AEW will win. Now that I’ve talked it out, I can see why it would make sense to say “Team AEW” because even though these guys are not on the same page, they are all top prospects to be on that team if we’re talking Anarchy in the Arena, Blood & Guts, etc. It’s just that we’re not there yet so they’ve started talking it up before it’s become a thing. Tony headcanon.
Joe praises Christian Cage’s promo.
On terms of “rule of cool” the promo works, but I actually didn’t find it that good. It was fine and delivered well but it really did nothing. Cheap heat does nothing for me most times. It just served to remind us that Christian is around, and also to get him there so Hook could attack him. It was just a placeholder, though.
Joe talks about AEW not being a promo company anymore, AEW no longer giving the 3 tenets: great promos, great matches, and lots of shit happening.
Really inarguable. This is a situation where “rule of cool” would cut through a lot of the fat. At one time, this dominated what AEW was putting out.
Joe’s production notes: not playing entrance music on run-ins, running out in street clothes, nothing in the backstage area, no cars; being different.
These notes are good, though I don’t think necessary they’d definitely help.
Joe talks about MJF arriving in a car.
When he said “let’s just stop this” I thought he meant the MJF/Cole feud and I would have agreed very hard. He just meant “no more car stuff” though which is a good point too.
Joe talks about Jericho/Cardona being a bigger draw than Athena.
Need to pay attention to ROH again as I don’t know how good Athena is right now, but two things I will say are that Athena doesn’t have the crazy buzz she used to have and that I don’t think there’s an opponent out there for her to have a big deal match with. At one point Jamie Hayter may have been a big enough opponent for Athena to main event but they’ve managed to damage Hayter enough that I don’t think it would work.
Joe talks about Cole/O’Reilly, MJF not over.
Pretty much agreed. Junk story.
Joe talks about Private Party segment, lack of rankings, multi-person matches.
Disappointed Joe didn’t talk about the terrible jackets. Will talk more about the rankings and multi-person matches later.
Joe talks about Toni Storm’s return.
Like Joe, I was hoping really hard that Toni Storm would just be Toni Storm, but I’m hearing that she’s doing an “amnesia” gimmick. I was really crushed by hearing that. I’ll talk about it in a bit.
Reprise
I will be blunt: Heat and hatred are overrated. Storytelling is overrated. Character work is overrated.
“Heat and hate” have become a catchphrase of Joe Lanza and it’s something that I’ve thought a lot about over this last year or so he’s been beating the drum. There is a lot in the idea that these are the main components. But even as I’ve been thinking about it, I’ve been skeptical of the conclusion.
I’m not writing a big treatise here, so I’m not going to go through and be extremely thorough. I’ll just list a few pieces of evidence for me to refer to later:
- What was the big driver of New Japan Pro Wrestling’s boom period led by Okada? I think it’s almost inarguable that the main draw was the great matches and the high-stakes situations. The prestige of the title, the desire people had to get it, and the exciting wrestling that came about as a result. What is NJPW not giving us these days? And what are they doing instead?
- When Ring of Honor was building its reputation, what was driving people to check the promotion out?
- When AEW was doing its best work, it was giving the 3 tenets. Now it’s giving none of them, not regularly. But what is it still attempting to do, more than ever?
- What was NXT doing at its hottest period? What is it most known for from that time?
The answer in all of these is wrestling is hot when it’s providing great action and it’s cold when it’s only trying to focus on hate and heat. It’s the action more than anything else that gets people engaged.
Too much is made of pro wrestling being a kind of theater, pro wrestling being all about psychology and storytelling. It is those things, absolutely, but as a second-order concern. That is to say that people are making storytelling the main thing when it isn’t and I don’t think it ever has been. Even when we’re talking about ECW and the Attitude Era in WWF, we’re not talking about high quality storytelling, what we’re talking about is a lot of stuff happening that was extremely stimulating: extreme violence, sexualization, taboo breaking, etc. It still comes down to action.
I’ve talked about this in my previous piece, High Stakes in Pro Wrestling. To summarize it, my point isn’t that “hate and heat” don’t have any place. They’re still important. But what’s more important is the action and the stakes. The action is the main thing, obviously. The stakes are important because they’re what the booker controls and they act as an indication of what kind of action the fans can expect. If the match is for a prestigious title, then the wrestlers should be trying harder, which means the match should be better. That’s what really brings people in to begin with.
Storytelling and heat should not be the primary things that a wrestling promotion provides. They’re instead better used, in my opinion, as the spice that turns a fight from interesting to must-see. But they have to be interesting to begin with, and they won’t be if your action and stakes aren’t in place. It’s the difference between a beef on the Ultimate Fighter and the feud between Conor McGregor and Khabib Nurmagodenov. One is a money feud, one is a minor storyline on an entry-level TV show.
I think one thing that has a lot of people fooled is that older wrestling is much less active than modern wrestling. That’s true. Go take a survey of other 80s shows vs. modern shows. The fact is that in earlier ages, before the 90s especially, it was much more difficult to get action on television or even in live shows. Outside of legitimate sports, you simply couldn’t get the kind of action you got even in a somewhat slow wrestling match. Plus, I’m not sure how often boxing was on TV or in local arenas, but wrestling may have been the only type of combat sport available regularly.
This is speculation, obviously, but it’s at least worth exploring. I think that when we’re seeing all of these heat-getting segments from the past, we’re not necessarily feeling the same level of excitement as people then would have been feeling even if we’re watching something similar. And as a shakier speculation, what if the reason that a lot of the hijinks of earlier ages really worked was that there was the assumption that some of it was real, so the stakes were always there. One thing that always sticks out in my memory is Jim Cornette saying that when he was younger he thought he was smart to the business because he knew that most matches were fake but he still thought that some matches, the big deal matches especially, were real. If pro wrestling is a real sport that just happens to have some very carny aspects, you can be invested in your local wrestlers, thinking that if they do well they might move on and keep showing how good they are.
The stakes formed the base of the investment, the action was the experience people had, but the heat-getting is all that remains for us, watching from a future with much higher-paced wrestling.
Here’s another thought: kayfabe was invented to prevent people finding out pro wrestling was rigged. Was this mainly to stop storylines getting out, so fans didn’t know faces and heels were buddies, or to prevent people knowing that the matches were pre-determined?