I’ve been pretty out of the loop on wrestling recently, but I happened to need something to listen to so I put on the most recent Flagship Plus from Joe Lanza (patreon link). The theme of his monologue was inauthenticity in wrestling, talking about the fact that Samoa Joe – a guy who is past his prime, who isn’t a draw at this stage – is the most badass person in All Elite Wrestling today. It’s been a while since I’ve watched the show but that’s what I remember from when I was watching. As Lanza says: “The guy has an authenticity and an I· Will· Fuck· You· Up· energy that breaks through the walls of kayfabe and jumps right off the screen, YOU· BELIEVE· in Samoa Joe.” He’s real fired up about Joe and it’s hard not to be. Everything that Lanza says is absolutely true.
The specific line of thought that made me want to reflect on the monologue was Lanza feeling disconnected from AEW today, despite the fact that they put on what’s pretty uniformly thought of as great wrestling. Early on he says “This [Dynamite] had all three of the elements you look for in a great episode of Dynamite. … There are wrestling shows historically where maybe the boxes that need to be checked would be a bit different to constitute what a great show would be.” A couple of minutes later, he follows that up with “The problem is … I am struggling to connect with this promotion right now. Or maybe it’s the other way around, this promotion is struggling to connect with me right now, and I can’t really pinpoint why.”
That sentiment hit me hard because I have been extremely disconnected from AEW for a few years now. I know last year I was making an attempt to watch Dynamite weekly… but that didn’t succeed, did it? And the reason I stopped is largely because it began to feel like a chore. In the beginning, I was engaged because I was primarily using it as a launchpad to reflect on Lanza and Kraetsch’s thoughts about the shows. But if you’re doing it week after week, the show itself starts to loom larger, and the fact that I wasn’t really enjoying it became more critical.
