AEW isn't the New Extreme Championship Wrestling...It's Better than That
The best American wrestling promotion of the modern era
Chris Jericho sat in a ring covered in broken glass, blood flowing into his long hair and makeup in a terminal state of decay. He’d just won the damndest match of a career in its third decade, a bout on national television for All Elite Wrestling with baseball bats, light bulbs, a pizza cutter and panes of window glass all employed liberally to coat both the mat and competitors in viscera and gore.
His opponent was Nick Gage, a slightly pot-bellied ex-con who’d become a legend of the independent scene thanks to a propensity for violence and a serious affect that bordered on the absurd (while not so secretly being a kind soul behind the scenes). Going into the match, the contingent of online smart fans assured themselves AEW would never go through with the kind of bonafide death match that had made Gage famous. Surely, they reasoned, Turner Network Television would be uncomfortable with the ultraviolence and blood that defines the modern death match of which Gage was clearly the king.
But whatever rules exist to box in contemporary pro wrestling, now a corporate-driven enterprise designed to offend no one, clearly don’t apply to AEW and its wunderkind mastermind Tony Khan. Jericho, among other things, hit Gage with a hurricanrana off the top rope, sending the indie star crashing through a plate of glass precariously balanced between two chairs. It was a spectacle in the best way, a unique bout that has never been presented to a truly mainstream audience.
The match attracted more than a million fans on TNT, more than half of them in the coveted 18-49 year old demographic advertisers crave. Scolds and critics will have to work awfully hard to categorize the match, or the promotion, as anything but a bonafide success.
The son of Jacksonville Jaguars owner (and car bumper king) Shad Khan, Tony grew up a fan of Paul Heyman’s Extreme Championship Wrestling. A Philadelphia based indie, ECW was another genre-redefining promotion that both mixed different styles of wrestling, took wild risks and built a loyal, cult-like following that supported the group through thick and thin.
You can see the ghosts of ECW informing the AEW product on an almost weekly basis. Both groups expertly catered to their loyal fans and cultivated an us-against-the-world ethos while also surprising and challenging them routinely with the avant garde and weird.
In ECW, Heyman reached out and grabbed cutting edge international talent like Rey Mysterio and the high-flying spot machines from Michinoku Pro to work right alongside hardcore violence machines like Sabu and New Jack, technical wizards like Dean Malenko, legends in their primes like Steve Austin and Mick Foley and even industry icons like the great Terry Funk.
In AEW, those roles have been filled by Joshi talents like Riho and Maki Itoh, lucha libre stars like Rey Fenix, New Japan workrate Gods Kenny Omega and the Young Bucks, WWE-refugees Jon Moxley and Cody Rhodes and living legends Jericho and Sting.
Like ECW, Khan’s AEW is pushing limits in ways that make older fans slightly uncomfortable. Unlike ECW, they are doing it in a way that doesn’t preclude financial success, a fine-line for any entertainment product pushing traditional boundaries and norms.
AEW isn’t just the next-ECW—it’s a better version of the beloved hardcore troupe, less a cover-band than a better model built with the same set of blueprints. While ECW played mostly to smaller arenas like the infamous “Bingo Hall” they called home, AEW has successfully drawn large crowds everywhere they’ve gone, recently selling 10,000 tickets in a single day at Chicago’s United Center for an upcoming Friday night event that will be one of four AEW shows in the city in just a three-week period.
Yes, AEW has some advantages ECW could have only dreamed of. In the Khan family, they had an enthusiastic source of both capital and expertise and the connections to plow into both the arena and television businesses without having to crawl before hitting the ground at a full sprint. While Heyman gathered together a collection of misfits and made the best of them, AEW recruited and signed top industry talent right out from underneath the WWE and international rivals like New Japan.
There was also an opening that didn’t exist in Heyman’s time—ECW competed head on with two pre-existing behemoths in WWE and WCW. Khan had only WWE to worry about after the McMahon family decimated all competitors in a thirty-year razing that left the industry a shambles compared to what it had once been in its heyday.
In fact, WWE had operated for so long as the only game in town, that there is an entire generation of fans completely ignorant of any other approach to the business. That’s a blessing and a curse for Khan—it allows him to present classic tropes and angles that appear fresh to virgin eyes while also forcing the company to deal with pushback from fans who have only WWE’s, frankly, milquetoast product as a point of reference. To these fans, AEW looks like something completely alien and weird, rather than a modern updating of traditional wrestling concepts.
Opinions, obviously, will differ. For me, it’s as if Khan continuously reaches into my head to find ideas and matches built specifically for my personal enjoyment. Whether it’s bringing in independent favorites like Gage or Eddie Kingston, highlighting the amazing Kenny Omega as a goofball heel champion or creating storylines that actually payoff over time, Khan has built a promotion that wows me weekly, one that has earned my trust even when the stories don’t go exactly as I expected they might.
That’s a welcome development for fans who have spent years watching WWE seemingly go out of its way time-after-time to take an act the audience has rallied behind and making them feel stupid for investing the emotional energy. In WWE, things the fans love are allowed to wither and die on the vine rather than be plucked if it’s not the particular fruit the company has decided it wants to serve that month.
AEW, by contrast, never feels like it’s ignoring the hardcore fans that pack arenas and cheer enthusiastically from the first match right through the last. As a family, we attended most of the promotion’s early events. The surprise crowd favorites were pretty clearly Darby Allin, Jungle Boy and Orange Cassidy. Almost two years later, all have been elevated and carefully prepared for even bigger things surely coming down the road. Simply put, that kind of thing doesn’t happen in WWE, where all would have been left to struggle on the undercard without the right political cover or industry connections.
Even the promotion’s most notorious misses, the Dark Order and initial launch of the women’s division, were redeemed through a combination of promotional patience and fan support for compelling homegrown talent like John Silver and Britt Baker who grew into their roles as national television stars. It has to say something about AEW that even their misses eventually boomeranged right into bullseyes.
The fans believe the promotion will deliver storylines that make sense and characters who feel three-dimensional and fun. It allows AEW to do something unexpected, like having popular wrestler Hangman Page lose a number-one contender’s match, without the audience abandoning the angle or the character. That kind of good will is the product of trust that is hard-earned and well deserved.
While it comes across well on television, AEW is best experienced in person. It’s there, together with thousands of others under the same spell that has you enthralled, that it’s truly clear what a hot product this is. People are there because they love what they’re seeing. No one is sitting on their hands, muttering unhappily or waiting for one of a handful of acts they care about before they start making noise.
This is a crowd and a fanbase that truly supports all of the wrestlers—traditionally a sign of a healthy and prosperous promotion. In the 1980s, wrestling fans in the Carolinas were fully engaged with talent up-and-down the card, from upper midcard legends like the Midnight and Rock-and-Roll Express(es) to the Four Horsemen on top. During the Attitude Era of the late 1990s, undercard acts like Rikishi, Too Cool and the Godfather would routinely receive staggering pops from an audience that fully embraced a hot product.
Some might balk at AEW being placed in such rarefied air, but that’s what it feels like to attend one of their events. The fans love the wrestlers and that feeling appears mutual. The show has something for everyone—workrate spotfests, bloodbaths, technical exhibitions, tightly constructed long-term storylines and the kind of organic interviews that haven’t been heard since a single voice took over the business 20 years ago. In fact, it’s my opinion that AEW’s first three years belong right alongside classic MidSouth and the early Four Horsemen period on TBS as the best run of televised wrestling in the last forty years.
While no one has been able to keep that kind of winning streak going over the long haul, AEW doesn’t feel like it’s faltering. We are in the middle of a wrestling Renaissance with AEW at the fore. Enjoy it while it lasts.