The COVID-19 situation has permeated every aspect of society and life today, including professional wrestling. Independent wrestling companies who do not have a regular time slot on television have been out of work because they can’t do shows in front of large gatherings.
For those companies that can still go on television, such as WWE and AEW, they have been conducting their programming in an empty arena with limited personnel. At first glance, watching wrestling matches and no reactions to the various spots is very strange indeed. No doubt you are reacting at home, but it really isn’t the same without hearing the crowd reaction in the arenas.
However, one benefit of the absence of crowds is that people can be fully absorbed into scripted segments and promos now that the outer noise is absent.
I was watching the Triple H, Johnny Gargano and Tommaso Ciampa segment at the end of this week’s NXT, the one when a match “for the last time” was arranged for both men in two weeks. Watching that segment, it came off as like watching a hit TV drama with the suspense hanging in the air.
Throw in an extra mysterious vignette (which actually now shows the image of Killer Kross, a recent signee to the WWE Performance Center) and the mystique and story line gets carried across very well, making fans wondering what happens after the final Ciampa-Gargano confrontation.
As for AEW, the Chris Jericho and ‘Broken’ Matt Hardy confrontation, the empty arena factor yielded somewhat of a mixed bag. The empty seats allowed Hardy to do this weird teleportation bit, where he ‘magically’ moves down from the middle rafters to the ringside area.
However, it was so blatantly transparent that it was staged that it somewhat dimmed the reality of the situation. Having the lights go out and Hardy appearing in the ring with Jericho would have been more sensical. At least even the company recognized the irrationality of teleportation and clarified that it was ‘holographic projection’ from Vanguard 1.
Watching a more ‘reality based’ Jericho conversing with Hardy in fully ‘Broken’ mode was something else. Only by perusing the ‘Free the Delete’ series on Hardy’s YouTube channel do you get a sense of what he is talking about when it comes to the “3000 year old essence” known as “Damascus” replacing the “previous tenant” within Hardy’s ‘vessel’.
Minus a live audience with all the noise, it really makes you listen to the conversation, no matter how silly it can sound at times.
For those of you who think this is really not indicative of AEW competing on WWE’s level, perhaps that’s the whole point. AEW is taking wrestlers who never got that creative direction in the biggest wrestling company in the world and giving them that freedom to engage in that direction.
It’s certainly a nice distraction from all the negative news surrounding this pandemic permeating our lives every single day.
An average professional doing the 9-5 grind who really loves wrestling across all platforms. Here's hoping wrestlers finally get some basic workers rights in 2021.
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