James Lascuola

The Eve of the Wednesday Night Wars & the Paradigm Shift in Pro Wrestling

To say that the current landscape of Professional Wrestling has undergone a change in this year would be a complete understatement. After well over a decade of the complacence of one promotion dominating the television landscape, a new contender arises.

All Elite Wrestling has managed to stir up a mass amount of hype since the onset of the new year with only vignettes, press conferences and roster announcements before their first ever event in a five month timespan. On May 15th of this year, literally days before Double or Nothing, they would announce the television deal with WarnerMedia for the show on TNT that would become the debuting AEW Dynamite. While this is an incredible amount of success in such short time; and with a Wednesday night time slot, it would not be the only wrestling show going live on Wednesday nights.

NXT: a Wednesday night staple for the WWE Network. WWE’s infamous house of stars like Johnny Gargano, Tomasso Ciampa, and The Velveteen Dream. In an interesting turn, it would be announced that NXT would move from its regular TV taping schedule and onto a live two hour time-slot on the USA Network; filling the hole left behind by Smackdown which is moving back to Fridays on FOX.

We can spend much time speculating why decisions were made, there is no doubt that we are moving into an interesting period of time. For the first time since the original Monday Night Wars (not gonna count IMPACT’s 8 week “war” with RAW in 2010) that we have someone who just might have the ability to deliver a shock to WWE’s system and take them on in the ratings.

There are so many questions that are left in the air of time we have before things get underway: Could AEW prove to be a better ratings success than NXT? Will much of AEW’s indie-core roster resonate with a national audience? Is WWE gonna win another ratings war? Who’s gonna jump ship?

While much of the focus is set on the impending “Wednesday Night Wars”, you’d be insane to not see the sheer amount of wrestling available on your TV set.

RAW will still be running Monday nights as they have for years; and as previously mentioned, Smackdown will be finding its new home at prime time Friday nights on FOX. And they are really putting in effort to show how much of a big deal they want Smackdown to be on their new home.

For the first time in a long time, I am proud to say that IMPACT has finally reached a great television deal with AXS TV. Having gone from FOX Sports Network in the early 2000s, to SPIKE TV, and down further to progressively worse channels (including a hunting channel of all networks), it is great to see them on a channel that features wrestling.

Speaking of that channel, AXS is also home to New Japan Pro Wrestling as well as WoW: Women of Wrestling. I’ve yet to see WoW (though I hear great things), and from what I hear, AXS’ NJPW coverage is just events spliced up into episodes.

And who can forget the precursor to both AEW and NXT going live on Wednesdays: Beyond Wrestling’s Uncharted Territory. A weekly independent wrestling program airing live exclusively through Independent Wrestling TV. Constantly delivering compelling matches and the up-and-comers of independent wrestling on a weekly basis.

This is before we even get into all the content offered by subscription based streaming services like the aforementioned Independent Wrestling TV, Highspots On-Demand, and promotion specific services like Demand Progress, New Japan World and the WWE Network.

In closing, please just enjoy the damn wrestling. Sure people wanna see AEW stick it to Vince McMahon and WWE stick it to Cody (and all the stupid gratifying star ratings in between) but that doesn’t mean you should lose sight of the sheer availability of different brands and styles of wrestling. We may be in the best time period in a while to be a fan of wrestling and we should look at all we have and realize how great we have it.