AEW Dynamite Dec. 11, 2024 - Exasperation
It has been two weeks since the Continental Classic tournament returned in All Elite Wrestling. Two weeks of tournament action has led to some of the best AEW television in months, carried by high-quality in-ring performances. Yet questions have lingered regarding AEW’s shift to a more story and writing-heavy televised product, even as in-ring-focused talents like Brody King, Mark Briscoe, and Kyle Fletcher stole the spotlight. Consistency is what I most wanted to see in December, and consistency is unfortunately not what I received.
The first week of the Continental Classic saw three tournament matches on Dynamite, including both the opening segment and the main event. Week two of the C2 had just two matches, but they were yet again in the opening and closing segments of the show. The latest Dynamite once again had just two C2 matches. This week, however, the C2 was not featured in either the opening or closing segments of the show. Rather, they were stuffed into the end of the first hour and the middle portion of the second hour where matches go to die. There’s more to say on those matches coming up, but one thing is obvious to say — the C2 is wilting before our eyes as AEW’s more story-focused booking continues to take priority.
We’re back to the awful Dynamite programming from October and November already. Buckle up, this is as cynical a newsletter as I’ve written. I’m not happy with AEW right now.
Continental Casualty
In 2023, AEW invested all of itself in the debut of the Continental Classic. Four of AEW’s main eventers were included in the twelve-man tournament: Bryan Danielson, Jon Moxley, Eddie Kingston, and Swerve Strickland. Including those main carders enabled AEW to feature the C2 throughout Dynamite and its other shows prominently. Featuring the C2 prominently allowed the talent beyond just those four top guys to get a lot of attention, with each of them having their own impressive character arcs and story.
Now, not everyone may remember but the 2023 C2 did not start hot. Like this year, it started with a Thanksgiving show that annually receives notably low ratings. That’s not exactly the hot start you want for a big tournament. As such, it wasn’t until — you guessed it — week three that the 2023 C2 truly exploded into something special. Jon Moxley and Rush beat the shit out of each other in the show’s opening, Swerve and Mark Briscoe went over 15 minutes in the second match of the show, and Jay White would later deliver in a match against Jay Lethal. In week three of the 2023 C2, AEW remained invested in the tournament and its stars, and it was rewarded for it.
In week three of the 2024 C2 all of AEW’s failures came to a head. This year’s tournament is not the main event that last year’s tournament was, shifted toward the mid-card in a conscious decision from AEW creative. Insider reporting claims that both Adam Page and Jay White were shifted out of the tournament and into the main event, hitting the C2’s star power hard. The shift in priority for the C2 was felt even in week one, with wrestlers like Shelton Benjamin, Mark Briscoe, Claudio Castagnoli, Ricochet, and Brody King being featured instead of the tournament’s biggest names: Will Ospreay and current Continental Champion Kazuchika Okada. Instead of spending time expanding the stories of these C2 wrestlers, Dynamite instead spent its limited time on the neverending Adam Cole and Friends vs. MJF feud, and the bloated AEW Championship scene, which features not just Adam Page, Jay White, Orange Cassidy, and Jon Moxley, but Death Riders PAC, Yuta, and Marina Shafir, as well as Christian, Nick Wayne, Mother Wayne, Kip, and now Hook, too.
But what’s truly hurt the C2 most, even more than its freefall down the card, its thin main event talent, and its fighting for time on Dynamite against other angles, are the inherent issues plaguing all of Dynamite and AEW television at the moment. Wednesday’s show had two C2 matches, Will Ospreay vs. Claudio Castagnoli and Richochet vs. Brody King. If this was any show other than an AEW television show, Ospreay and Claudio would have had an instant Match of the Year contender. Instead, for reasons explored in previous newsletters, they had a perfectly mediocre, half-paced, exaggeratedly safe, and unimpressive match. It was both fine and incredibly disappointing. The same could be said for Ricochet vs. Brody, except with the added issue of Tony Khan deciding Ricochet should win. This, after Brody King beat Darby Allin and only lost to Claudio due to cheating over the past two Dynamites. It was a capital booking crime, punctuated by Ricochet’s smirk in response to boos from the crowd.
It’s week three of the C2, when the tournament should be hitting its stride and punching home each participant’s overarching story. Instead, the matches aren’t delivering and there are no tournament-entric stories. And can I repeat that current Continental Champion Kazuchika Okada has yet to have a C2 match on Dynamite? All of the lessons of the 2023 C2 are seemingly forgotten. Hopefully, AEW can do what it’s best at and pull out a last-minute set-up that builds to some great PPV matches and we have a few great matches along the way. Even that might be asking too much considering the current state of AEW. Fucking mediocre Ospreay vs. Claudio match that wasn’t even the opener or main event. What the fuck are we doing here?
Adam Cold
Yes, this subtitle is childish but that’s just the point we’ve reached. In the semifinal for the Dynamite Diamond Ring, Adam Cole defeated Kyle O’Reilly for a match against MJF at World’s End. This is the step before the culmination of a months-long feud between Cole and MJF that’s been excessively stretched to account for MJF being busy filming Happy Gilmore 2 since September. The feud could theoretically continue past World’s End, which many were expecting, but Cole got the win and soon we may all be rid of this dreadful neverending black hole eating time from every week’s Dynamite. It was not a great match. Neither Cole nor O’Reilly managed to get the crowd excited. And neither wrestler ever got out of first gear. It was just another disappointing chapter in this disaster of an angle.
It isn’t just that every match that Adam Cole has had since his return has been poor-to-middling. It isn’t just that Cole’s current babyface character makes no sense other than to get a quick babyface return pop and then keep MJF’s heel run warm while he’s away. It isn’t even that Cole looks like he’d rather be anywhere else when he’s on TV. It’s that the AEW audience has been telling Tony Khan that this feud sucks since it started and yet it’s still going.
Imagine a scenario where you are the head booker of AEW. Adam Cole returns to a huge pop, but his first promo calling out MJF (who is already known to be busy filming for the next two months) is a disaster. You bring him out the next week to try and recover the situation and it’s a disaster again. What do you do? If you answered anything other than “Stretch the feud out for two more months while you wait for MJF to return,” then you’ve done better than Tony Khan. You could have said Adam Cole got amnesia offscreen and started a new feud the next day on Dynamite and it would be better than what AEW fans have gotten. Khan could have ended this feud any given week for two months, and yet it’s still going.
Let’s be a little bit fair to Tony Khan and try to understand why he may have forced two months of feud between Adam Cole and pre-recorded videos from MJF. This is another subject that gets mentioned repeatedly in the newsletter. Tony Khan has a chosen few wrestlers that he sees as needing to be on Dynamite every single week. Adam Cole and MJF are both on that list of wrestlers. My theory is this is because of how much Khan pays these wrestlers and a belief, perhaps from his experience with football and soccer, that you have to field your highest-paid stars. That’s what you’re paying them for, after all. Kahn is also notorious for never cutting short angles that involve these chosen few. I can only theorize on why this is. Many believe it’s Khan’s fear of confrontation or a misdirected concept of respect for these stars. In other words, he doesn’t want to tell top wrestlers he’s changed plans, so he doesn’t change plans. Adam Cole could be in the C2, he could be putting Adam Page over, or he could be turning heel against Orange Cassidy. Anything else would be better, but Khan adamantly refuses to make hard shifts in programs for top talent that have already been planned out.
This is genuinely the worst feud in wrestling for 2024, a repeat of 2023, and somehow Tony Khan is the only one who hasn’t figured it out yet. I should feel relieved that Cole won this match and the PPV should be the end of it. But all I feel is exasperated.
Empower Women’s Wrestlers
Frequent newsletter readers will have noticed that I’ve avoided talking about Mariah and Mina. There’s a good reason for that. I don’t like criticizing the women’s division in AEW until there’s a very good reason for it. The women in AEW receive so much less time than the men, have fewer matches, have fewer options for competitors, and overall are treated much more poorly. They deserve so much more, and that includes less shit from me. With that said, when criticism is deserved it would be shitty not to call out the problem.
Mariah May was fast-tracked to the AEW Women’s World Championship over many different popular women in the division who truly deserved that opportunity. The reason why is easy to see. Toni Storm’s Timeless character was well-received, but more than that AEW rarely platforms more than one or two women’s angles at a time and so everyone in Toni’s orbit got more attention than everyone else in the division. It’s no surprise that when the choice of who will follow Toni was made, Mariah was seen as the only option since she was the only other woman getting regular TV time. All due respect, Toni and Mariah executed on their story exceptionally. The turn was magnificent. And it’s been a struggle since.
Once again, an AEW feud’s problem is a symptom of a deeper issue within the promotion. Over the past couple of years AEW’s creative team, which Tony Khan says has grown to nearly 30 people recently, has grown influence. It’s reached a point where there are frequent questions regarding whether the creative team actively works agaisnt the quality of AEW’s wrestling, instead ensuring that their creative work and wrestlers that suit their needs get more time and resources at the expense of exceptional wrestlers and the overall product. Mariah May, and Mina to a lesser extent, are a product of this environment. Between January when Mariah started with AEW and August when she beat Toni Storm for the AEW Championship, she had 22 matches. And brother, they ain’t worth going back for. On Cagematch not a single one of these matches averaged a 7 or better. It was story and AEW creative’s choice to put Mariah on TV over other women that led to her championship, even knowing it would mean a reign of low-quality in-ring action.
There is no better example of my point and why it matters so much for AEW at this moment than Mariah May vs. Mina. This is a feud with months of build behind it. It has been such a priority that AEW has kept Mariah out of anything but short-term feuds so she’d be ready for Mina’s return. This is the culmination of what AEW’s creative team sees as optimal booking. The result? A genuinely bad match where neither woman sought to elevate either the other or the match overall. The wrestling didn’t matter. Months of promos and pre-recorded videos and story utterly wasted. But hey, Toni Storm is back.
As ever, a serious AEW problem has a simple solution. Great wrestling must come first. Great wrestlers must come first. As much as all fans of wrestling can agree that story and character development matter tremendously, the end goal must always be to elevate and enhance the wrestling — not exist simply for itself. Because that’s not pro wrestling. While Mariah and Mina have both taken up significant amounts of TV time and produced few good matches, wrestlers like Willow Nightingale, Thunder Rosa, Hikaru Shida, Kris Statlander, and Jamie Hayter have been cycled in and out with short feuds with too little TV time. Imagine any of them being given the same kind of attention and what they could do with it, and the matches they could have as a result.
Quick Takes
With respect for everyone’s time, here are some shorter takes on various Dynamite topics that are worth mentioning:
World’s End 4-Way: The main event of World’s End has been set. It’s a 4-way between Mox, Hangman, Jay White, and Orange Cassidy. To start, can we agree this whole situation is a mess? The Death Riders invasion angle is completely forgotten, other than when Darby does a promo. But that’s also for the best, because it lets Mox make simple promos about who does and doesn’t deserve the AEW Championship. Why Hangman and Jay White are involved in this story suddenly makes no sense, but also Hangman really should be in the main event scene because he’s just so over and good right now. There are so many reasons why this 4-way shouldn’t be happening, but since it is it really could be worse.
Brody King: I touched on this in the C2 part of the newsletter earlier but I want to take an extra second to really applaud Brody King. He is the only C2 participant to be featured on Dynamite all three weeks so far and he has easily been the MVP of the tournament that whole way. He’s physical, bumps well, has creative spots throughout his matches, and bleeds personality. I want this guy prominent in AEW in a way I haven’t thought about Malakai Black in years. He’s just so cool. And yeah, if he won more that’d be great, too.
Darby Allin: There’s some insider talk that Darby is being lined up to be AEW champion before long. So let’s talk about this now while it can still be addressed. Darby has a great style and presence. But whenever he’s doing something facing the audience, like a promo or interview, he is not strong. He struggles to convey his goals and ideas clearly, he comes across as whiny instead of strong, and he never seems on the same page as everyone around him. Right now he’s still going on about how evil Mox is when he should be focusing on the C2. If I could edit his promos down I’d tell him to keep to the basics. Say what he wants, say why he wants it, and say it clearly and confidently. Wrestling fans love that shit. And it’d enhance Darby’s entire package dramatically.
Star Presence: There’s been discourse this past week about why AEW can’t create stars. Dave Meltzer specifically argued that AEW needs to have a babyface that never loses, and that’s not even the stupidest WWE-brained bullshit he said recently. Nevertheless, watching Dynamite I couldn’t help but think about it — and how AEW already has those superstars and simply isn’t using them to their full potential. Hangman, Mox, Will Ospreay, and MJF all stood out as strong examples. Not on Dynamite this week, but Swerve, Don Callis, Konosuke Takeshita, Kazuchika Okada, and Kenny Omega are all brilliant as well. Bryan Danielson and Sting are both on that list, too, but unavailable. If Tony Khan kept these wrestlers largely in feuds with each other, repeating and recycling them, and only split off to feud with (and rarely lose to) midcarders only when they’d proven themselves ready for it? That would make a major difference. And if the group is too small and all of those feuds have been done? Do them again. Instead, Hangman and Ospreay are regularly losing, Swerve got dropped by Bobby Lashley, MJF is in another Worst Feud of the Year, Kenny’s returning in NJPW, and Mox just had to have Yuta cheat to beat Orange Cassidy. They aren’t being booked like stars. Khan seems obsessed with elevating talent lower on the card at the expense of wrestlers who have proven they can carry the company to new heights (and then doesn’t raise the talent up the card long-term anyway).
That’s enough tilt for today. I’m not surprised that AEW Dynamite is disappointing, but I am frustrated that the excitement of the C2 only lasted two weeks before AEW fell back into its bad habits. Last year’s C2 was such a bright spot after a long autumn. This year’s C2 may end up being a flash of potential quickly extinguished. I’m losing hope that things get better without a complete overhaul of AEW’s booking and creative process. Tony Khan continues to have poor booking instincts and the people he’s trusting to help guide him in the right direction are making AEW worse. How do you fix that?
Thanks for reading the newsletter, everyone. It means a lot that you’re interested in my takes, whether you agree with them or not. Here’s looking forward to next week’s Holiday Bash. Ospreay better step the fuck up. Take care, everyone!
-Rory