MoS

Storm-Rosa got the show back on track after that terrible showing by Jericho

Doing shitty imitations of his idol Shawn Michaels while having a match worse than Shawn ever did

This shit sucked

"Please retire" chants for Jericho

This is an empty workrate match. I have never understood the love for Undisputed Era, they were on top during the worst period of NXT, the time when they definitively lost in the ratings and the "coolness" factor to AEW

I didn't watch the pre-show. Did Max Caster say something stupid again?

Love Willow

Julia Hart is so clearly the star of the House of Black, especially given that they are not pushing Brody as a singles wrestler

Credit to Copeland, I. have not exactly been complimentary of his AEW run so far, but after the feud with Christian has got over, he is doing a great job working with AEW talents

I love watching Eddie Kingston in the ring.

Loved the match

There are mitigating factors like ad breaks, but doing a year-long analysis of how the Bucks' quarters perform would be interesting, because having checked the quarters every week in real time, in the last year or so, my feeling is they have almost invariably lost viewers, often a massive number of viewers. Some of the drops in the Bucks' quarters are BRUTAL

Man, I dunno, I thought today's episode was excellent

Chris Hero and HOOK have the best reactions in the footage. Loved how Samoa Joe did not even look up throughout the confrontation until Punk was already trying to put the guillotine on JB

I have read different - see my response to fxnj. It should be clearer when the Observer comes out

Okada is great though. Extremely charismatic (not that that is news), looks and feels like a big-tome star, and a much needed boost to AEW

Okada - Hey PAC, I accept your challenge. I will see you at Dynasty! Excalibut - Okada is not mincing words!

From what has been reported, there was a separate incident between Punk and Tony that led to his firing, which was not shown here and which might not exist on tape. I agree with you that if this was the extent of the confrontation between them, then TK's claims after the incident are completely laughable

Whu is HOOK even agreeing to sit "under the learning tree" of Chris Jericho when in kayfabe he squashed Jericho like a bug when they wrestled?

Not when one company is taking passing shots in interviews while the other is dedicating TV time to respond

Will Ospereay, WHY are you using TV time to respond to shots someone took in some interview?!?! Who cares wtf he said?? As soon as you start doing that, you are letting the other person dictate the terms of engagement, letting them take the initiative while you are doing nothing more than responding to other people. It is absolutely pointless and counter-productive

They woke up for the FTR promo. They will respond to good promos

All right, my takeaways from that footage were - "There was far more talking during that confrontation than we had heard" and "Really, that was the 'fight'?" I am not even kidding, I have seen bigger fights at the law firm I work in. I understand the Punk-TK footage confrontation that was not shown here was the reason for Punk getting fired, and I would really hope so, because I cannot imagine someone getting fired in professional wrestling over that weaksauce "fight". Also, Punk's guillotine grip is really bad. How he has been doing BJJ for so many years and still doesn't know these fundamentals is beyond me

Even with the bolded part though, yes, in a lot of territories, the NWA heel champ coming in once or twice a year and the territory ace perpetually challenging him for the title would draw big. But for week-to-week booking, where the focus was on local wrestlers, weren't the territory aces carrying the promotion usually faces? I agree with your last couple of lines, I just think we have had enough of dominant heel reigns for now - MJF for at least half of his reign was a heel too.

Personally, enough of dominant heel title reigns. Time for some long babyface title reigns. That is the shit that ultimately creates generations of long-term fans. As an aside, I have always believed that the adage "money is in the chase" is at best very myopic and at worst outright incorrect, and I have always remembered reading a really good discussion about this on this forum. Since I am on leave right now, I decided to finally actually search the board for these posts, and have found the discussion. The entire discussion is excellent and should be read, but I will also quote a couple of SLL's posts about this. I will also quote @Loss discussing from the other perspective. Loss: SLL again: tl;dr - long heel runs can of course draw money, but a lot of people seem to think it's the only, or at least the most prominent way to present wrestling, and that is completely untrue, and arguably, long face reigns have historically drawn more money than long heel reigns