Wrestling Shows Don’t All Have To Aim For “Epic”

PHILADELPHIA — When I was first getting into wrestling, as a wee lad of about nine or ten, I had to beg my parents to let me buy the big pay-per-views in what was then the WWF. The names are still synonymous with Big Wrestling Pay-Per-View: Royal Rumble, SummerSlam, Survivor Series, WrestleMania. These shows felt like the biggest events in my young world, and I was always enraptured for the entire duration. I was too young to discern things like "match quality" and "pacing," and too excited to care. I just wanted to see Stone Cold Steve Austin beat the shit out of Vince McMahon. Even with the boundless energy of a kid, my emotions ran so high that I would be exhausted just from watching. After I stayed up somewhat late on a Sunday night for a PPV, the following Monday at school was split evenly between yapping with my friends about the show and wanting to take a nap.

I bring all this up because it now seems almost quaint that a three-hour WWF/E show used to induce a placid state of overawed sleepiness. As I write this, the morning after I attended All Elite Wrestling's Dynasty show at Temple University's basketball arena on Sunday night, I am struggling for something like the opposite reason. Dynasty is safely considered a B-show for AEW; it's between two of its own big shows, March's Revolution and Memorial Day Weekend's Double or Nothing, and as such it should be OK for Dynasty to serve more as an exhibition than an all-time great show. That clearly wasn't the aim from wrestling's No. 2 company, and the overstuffed, near-endless show that we got on Sunday delivered exhausting proof of that.

The proceedings began around 6:30 p.m. with the Zero Hour pre-show; we filed out of the Liacouras Center at nearly 12:30 a.m, six brutal hours later. It is true that no one truly engages with the pre-show, and it is also true that, even if a fan arrived at or before 6:30, it's likely that they were grabbing concessions—an ordeal on Sunday; the venue kept running out of hot dog buns—or on their phone. But even if you remove the two matches from Zero Hour and put the start time closer to the official 8 p.m. slot, that's still 10 matches and four-and-a-half hours of wrestling on a work night.

These were not throwaway matches, either, at least in terms of length. Except for a comedy 40-second squash by a returning Anthony Bowens on his former tag partner Max Caster during the pre-show, every match ran more than 11 minutes in length, and there were two 30-minute marathons back-to-back at the end of the night. I'll get to those, but there is just no reason to stuff so many matches onto one card. There were three quarterfinals matches for the Owen Hart Cup Tournament and seven title matches on the main show; not all of them were PPV-worthy.

I'm glad that the show opened hot with Will Ospreay, a wrestler I mostly cannot stand but who is undeniably hyper-athletic and clearly talented at connecting with crowds, and Kevin Knight. Ospreay's entrance was one of the loudest moments of the night and Knight, especially, came out for a hot 14-minute "sprint." It was a good start, although that running time would come to seem ominous in retrospect.

I missed most of the tag title match between champions Hurt Syndicate and The Learning Tree, but people seemed into it; this was the period of the evening during which I was repeatedly trying and failing to acquire the aforementioned hot dogs. The momentum carried through another quarterfinal, between Mercedes Moné and Julia Hart, at which point the first controversial booking decision of the night arrived.

It's here I must admit that I have not kept up with AEW over the last six months. I had shit going on in my life, and I didn't really find the need to watch Dynamite every Wednesday or even keep up with the PPVs. So I was unaware that people seem to detest the Death Riders gimmick, and while it was funny to see the Philly crowd boo local boy Wheeler Yuta, I was a bit confused by how much ire the company's top heel stable was catching in their match against Rated FTR, which consists of Cope, the wrestler formerly known as Edge, working alongside tag legends FTR. This ignorance worked in my favor, because the crowd wasn't just angry with the Death Riders (PAC, Claudio Castagnoli, and Yuta), but seemingly angry that they were still an angle at all. I enjoyed the match, as I almost always do with high-action trios, but the frustration in my section and throughout the arena had begun to be palpable. It would come and go without ever quite disappearing for the rest of the evening.

The post-match angle, in which FTR turned on Cope quite violently, popped some life into the crowd, as did the following match with "Timeless" Toni Storm successfully defending her women's world title against a very game and very hoss-y Megan Bayne. (In my time away from AEW, apparently the "Timeless" gimmick went from one of my biggest annoyances to the most popular thing in the company.) Beloved indie stalwart Mark Briscoe also popped the crowd directly after, in a losing effort against the "Protostar"—what the hell does that mean, man—Kyle Fletcher, in a match rich in gnarly neck and back bumps. This was all good, and yet the stage felt set for boredom and exhaustion—it was still early, there had already been so much, and there was so much more to come.

And by god, that's 2025 Chris Jericho's music. At this point, Jericho is the living definition of "go-away heat," a legend who has squandered his goodwill with subpar matches and questionable backstage stories ranging from the expected to the horrifying. The Mask vs. Title stipulation for his bout against Bandido for Jericho's Ring of Honor world title held some suspense, as did a silly finish involving a bat and Bandido's family, but this was when the gears indisputably started grinding for Dynasty, and where I started to think that maybe AEW's approach for PPVs is inherently flawed.

While I appreciate that PPVs are $50 and so must contain a lot of wrestling to justify that price, I can't in good conscience support following a Jericho match with a 15-and-a-half minute showdown between Daniel Garcia and Adam Cole. Some of that is on me—I've long fled the Cole bandwagon, and Garcia is a cool personality who might be the most boring wrestler in the ring for AEW, at least of the ones getting plenty of air time—but not all of it. This one was brutal to sit through, and a sign of what was still to come.

The final two matches of the night were AEW at its most excessive, both as a compliment and as a point of derision. First up was a triple-threat between beloved International Champion Kenny Omega, wildly hated heel Ricochet, and "Speedball" Mike Bailey, a newcomer to the company. This was the type of storytelling match that AEW does so well, featuring three masterful wrestlers who understand their characters and strengths on a primal level. Despite the crowd going comatose during the previous two matches, there were loud chants of "BALD FOR-EVER!" at Ricochet, Omega got his usual pops for all his big moves, and Bailey became the underdog babyface to a crowd that, exhausted though they may have been, was ready to fall in love with someone they had not seen all that often. (Bailey has a long and storied career on the indies and in TNA, but that doesn't mean every fan knew who he was.)

Had that been a 20-minute match, it could well have been one of the best AEW matches I've ever seen. It wasn't, and it wasn't. The trio dragged it out to 31 minutes almost on the dot, and the volume of kickouts and near-falls began to wear on me. I should never want these three wrestlers, putting in this level of effort, to wrap it up, but ... yeah, they really should have wrapped it up, particularly given that the most polarizing match on the card was still coming up in the main event.

As I said before, I had no idea that fans hated the Death Riders storyline; it makes sense, then, that they especially hate Jon Moxley's title reign at the helm of that faction. I can see why after sitting through what was, I am sorry to say, a wildly garbage-grade main event. It was a bit disorienting to see Moxley get booed so heartily, and even more so to hear the chants I heard during that match, which again was a world title match against Swerve Strickland. I will list those chants, because they do a good job of representing what the crowd was feeling as Sunday turned into Monday:

• "Wrap it, wrap it up!"
• "O-ver-booked!"
• "This! Match! Sucks!"
• "Yay, more holds, yay!"
• "It's! A! Work night!"
• "This is boring!"
• "My balls hurt!"

If you've got people in the crowd chanting about their aching testicles during a main event, something has gone wrong. I haven't kept up enough with AEW to offer a judgement on the booking of said main event—Moxley retained after the Death Riders interfered, then got chased to the back by "Hangman" Adam Page and The Opps, and then the Young Bucks returned to screw Strickland. But I can say that a match full of slow-paced submission holds, Moxley yelling at the crowd and throwing up middle fingers, and a messy finish is not the way to get people to leave your promotion's show feeling good about their choice to remain in their seats for so long. There was a cool spot, though, where Strickland did his signature stomp off a ladder and through an announcing table, but the wrestlers moved on from it rather quickly and into that finish.

I think the issue with the pacing and length of Dynasty can be boiled down to AEW's unspoken mission statement as a company. For that reason, I don't see this situation getting much better before it gets even worse. Since its inception, AEW has been the promotion for the fans, in comparison to WWE's strategy of catering to Vince McMahon's whims—and even with McMahon gone, those executive whims still carry the day more often than not, even if they now belong to Paul "Triple H" Levesque. As such, AEW has always operated full throttle on its PPVs, and fans have been rewarded with some of the best wrestling shows of all time as a result. Somewhere along the way, though, AEW drank its own Kool-Aid, and a worrying bit of bloat began to creep into the proceedings. Shows started to tick up in terms of both match count and duration. If every PPV had to have at least two or three Match of the Year candidates, then it makes sense that the company would overstuff everything in hopes of striking gold a few times. Or, anyway, it makes sense from the company's perspective.

And this really does work when the product is hot; fans don't mind paying for quality, and AEW used to deliver that in spades. Now, though, with the product in a lull and a main storyline that seemingly everyone wants to end, the desire to make Dynasty into a must-watch clearly warped and inflated the proceedings and buried the things that AEW does well. Its early shows were five- and six-match classics in part because the wrestling was great, but also because there was no downtime. It was almost always all bangers all the time, and shows like that tend to age well. Dynasty read, in some sense, like the AEW story in microcosm: It started hot, bogged itself down with excess, and ended on a sour note that seemed designed to please no one. This is not how you particularly want a PPV to go.

There are ways to fix it, though. The first would be to shrink the match count, at least on these B-shows. Move them down to three-hour affairs; maybe lower the price accordingly, as well. If Dynasty had removed the Owen Hart Cup quarterfinals, save for the Ospreay-Knight one, and also sent both the Jericho match and the Garcia-Cole slog to the shadow realm, it would have been a six-match show with no lulls; even that ending becomes more palatable if it comes at 11 p.m. instead of 12:30 a.m. (There's also an argument for moving the start forward an hour to 7 p.m., particularly for Sunday shows, but that should come hand-in-hand with the more condensed card.) There's still going to be a sour taste in the mouths of anyone who sat through the main event, but that's a lot easier to take if it doesn't come at the end of a burnt-out candle of a show.

Otherwise, fans end up stuck with a product that they don't especially like, and which isn't all that likable, for long enough that their distaste becomes audible. AEW isn't alone in this commitment to quantity over quality; WWE shows had climbed to untenable lengths before the non-"Big" PPVs got brought back down to more reasonable three-hour affairs. Even where the old bloat remained, some easy logistical fixes made the finished product more bearable; see, for instance, the brilliant choice to turn WrestleMania from an eight-hour endurance check into a two-night spectacle. Length doesn't equal value, and more is not necessarily or inherently more. The White Lotus just had a 90-minute finale that people seemed to hate; big-ticket movies routinely blow beyond the normal two-hour mark in hopes that making something long enough might somehow also make it good enough (hello, two-hour-and-41-minute Part 1 of Wicked).

This inability or unwillingness to commit, or merely to edit, screams "lack of confidence." Blasting a shotgun of darts at a board in hopes of scoring one or two bullseyes suggests, among other things, that no one involved really knows which darts are likely to find the mark. AEW became must-watch wrestling because it was dexterous about that sort of thing where WWE wasn't; they landed plenty of 25s alongside the bullseyes, and won a loyal following as a result. But now the spread has become wildly inconsistent, and fans are also stuck watching them reload the chamber one by one. There's a better way, and that better way is also the shorter one. The company needs to realize that before it further alienates the very fans that made those epics of years past into the stuff of legend they became. Giving the people more is fine, but only if you're giving them something they want.