Welcome to the “Week 15 of the Wednesday Night Wars” edition of The Wrestling List.
Let’s get into AEW this week. The big story leading off 2020 that the company has been building around has been would Jon Moxley accept the invitation of Chris Jericho to join the Inner Circle. That ended up being the main event segment this week and I thought it was well done. Moxley arrives while Jericho continues to push on his hopes that Moxley will join them and that they will take over the company. Moxley continues to mention all the promises that he had been given including the car. Moxley accepts. They all celebrate. As I am watching this, I keep waiting for the swerve……and waiting…..and waiting….and waiting. LOL. This dragged out forever as I kept waiting for Moxley to nail Jericho. I am also watching the clock saying we still have a lot of time left here as this continues to go on. Finally, Moxley says yeah, just kidding and lays out Jericho. They definitely teased that with that the swerve wasn’t coming. So, we’ll have Moxley against Jericho going forward and that will be fun. The show opened with Omega and Page taking on Private Party. Would Page and Omega be on the same page? They did the greatest hits dissension type spots with matches where partners aren’t getting along. Page and Omega end up winning. A week after it was originally supposed to take place but we have Riho defending the women’s title against Kris Statlander. Story of the match ends up with Brandi and her crew getting involved. This costs the match for Statlander with Riho retaining. In the post match, the attack on Statlander tried to continue but was broken up when several got involved. This Christopher Daniels storyline is interesting with how they are doing it. Basically, painting him as the veteran at the end of his career that is a shell of his former self. Can I say how it kind of saddens me too with this storyline cause I am used to the insane high flying style of Daniels? Daniels takes on Guevara. Daniels loses the match when he gets distracted by Pentagon up on the ramp calling Daniels out for being a shell of himself and asking to see a best moonsault ever. Story of the finish has that getting in Daniels head and it costs him the match as Guevara pins him. And whew, then The Dark Order appears trying to recruit him. I say whew as in AEW is already going to have to do some rehab on that group after that bad finish a few weeks ago. They had zero momentum as the company started. Then, the vignettes started airing and were getting thumbs up from many fans. Getting them some momentum. Then, that Dynamite finish to end 2019. I don’t know if they can get that group back on track now. They may be damaged goods for sure now. They try and recruit Daniels but he rejects them. Dark Order beats down Daniels. My match of the night was Cody and Dustin against The Lucha Brothers. I liked this match a lot. I don’t really know why. It was just fun and solid. Cody and Dustin get the win. After the match, Tony interviewed Cody asking about the stipulations that MJF wants for their match. Arn Anderson asks why can MJF lay down stipulations for this and that they are going to talk about it before making an announcement. I did take in the very cool moment of seeing Tony in the ring with Arn, Cody, and Dustin on TNT. Just a cool retro moment. Speaking of retro, we had DDP and MJF face to face again. I was laughing. at MJF playing on his phone while DDP was in the middle of the ring doing his hype up promotion. When DDP got done, MJF walked to the center of the ring with a “are you done?” vibe. LOL. Very good back and forth here with promos. MJF brings out the Butcher, Blade, and Bunny who also want a piece of DDP. I don’t know what it does for the Butcher and Blade for their longterm that DDP just took them out so easily. LOL. MJF takes down DDP but is saved by Dustin and Marshall. They sure are teasing a DDP vs. MJF match. Best Friends and Orange Cassidy took on Jurassic Express. Whew, I got nervous at one point where it looked like Cassidy was about to pin Jungle Boy. I said surely you didn’t do all that to build him against Jericho and then have him pinned by Cassidy of all people. Thankfully that did not happen. Jurassic Express won the match. Marco Stunt was also doing a lot of spots in this one as this was his hometown.
Next week is the Bash at the Beach special and how weird is it hearing that name in January? LOL. The show will take place from Miami. One thing that AEW has to get better at is explaining who these new people are that pop up on TV. This has happened several weeks in a row where someone will debut and the commentary team stumbles over each other not knowing who it is. I did laugh at Tony this week when the one guy debuted during the women’s match and Tony laughed and said “Excalibur???” LOL. Meaning can you answer this as Excalibur is basically the info guy on the announce team knowing history and talents. When the announce team is as clueless as to who someone is like I am, that isn’t good. LOL.
This week’s NXT had a refresh kind of feel to it. I mean that as saying that the focus was more on getting some newer talents over and getting some focus on them and using the Dusty Rhodes Classic as a way to do so as well. We had the number one contender match with Keith Lee vs. Dijakovic vs. Grimes vs. Priest. This was definitely the biggest spot for Grimes and Priest yet. They had a very solid showing too. I just haven’t really been able to get into either of them so far. Just not my type of characters and style I guess. Grimes had an awesome spot where he flipped Lee’s crossbody over into a powerslam pin attempt. Lee ended up pinning Grimes with the spirit bomb to become the number one contender. The show opened with all attention on the new women’s champion, Rhea Ripley, as the challengers were all lining up for her. How strange is it seeing that belt on someone else besides Shayna and hearing a different announcement of women’s champion. We get NXT UK involvement here too which isn’t surprising with their big show coming up. Toni Storm and Kay Lee Ray are out there along with Candice, Bianca, and Io. I did laugh at Io on the mic where she got on the mic talking to Rhea and we couldn’t understand what she said but then points at the belt and says one word, “MINE”. That was great and all you need. LOL. We end up in a six woman tag with Candice, Toni, and Rhea against Belair, Io, and Kay Lee. The heel side can’t get along at all and are complaining at one another throughout. Mainly Io and Belair. Belair tags herself in as Io is about to go for the moonsault. That does not go over well with Io who nails Belair and basically walks out of the match. Rhea gets the win. We had two Dusty Rhodes Classic kickoff matches with NXT UK involvement. Forgotten Sons took on IMPERIUM of Barthel and Aichner. IMPERIUM advances. Fish and O’Reilly of Undisputed Era defeated Coffey and Wolfgang to advance as well. Johnny Gargano cut a promo about Finn Balor. Very interesting how split the crowd was on him and Balor. Gargano said how Balor had helped put NXT on the map but then he bailed quick when the call came for him to move up. He was carrying the flag for NXT and then he dropped it. Gargano said then I picked the flag up and took it all the way up to outer space. Balor arrived talking about how he took out Gargano and that the only thing Gargano had been cleared for was promos. He told Gargano to go talk to Regal and try to get a match for Takeover if he could even get cleared.
Ratings go to AEW for the week. They did 947,000 viewers which is down from last week’s 967,000. NXT did 721,000 which was up from last week’s 548,000. Keep in mind that NXT was not live last week so their viewership was way down. I didn’t watch NXT last week either with them not being live. In the 18-49 demo this week, NXT was at a 0.19 while AEW was at a 0.36. Variety had an interesting article this week looking at the Wednesday night ratings war on how it was going so far. One thing reported in there was the talk of how DVR viewing being added later in was significantly bumping up AEW’s ratings up. NXT was seeing a jump from DVR too but AEW was getting a bigger jump. With DVR’s, AEW is averaging 1.2 million viewers a week while NXT is averaging 972,000. Here is the article if you would like to check it out.https://variety.com/2020/tv/news/aew-nxt-ratings-wednesday-night-wars-1203434472
Show of the Night: I’m going with AEW this week.
Match of the Night: Dustin and Cody against The Lucha Brothers.
That is it for today. Hope you have a great rest of the week!
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