It’s 1997. WWE’s biggest competitor airs weekly programming on TBS and TNT. Tony Schiavone provides the analysis. Sting and Chris Jericho are there.
It has now been 25 years. TBS and TNT once again aired weekly programming featuring WWE’s biggest competitors. Schiavone, Sting, and Jericho continue to exist. If you haven’t been interested in the project over the past two decades, you might assume that AEW is a continuation of WCW – just a series of wrestlers making each other bleed, stretching back to Magnum TA and the Road Warriors. However, this is clearly no longer the case.
In 2001 the World Championship Wrestling stopped working. 1 win WWE sold the recording library, intellectual property and a number of wrestler contracts. For nearly a decade, WWE hasn’t faced much competition on the national stage. Yes, there was TNA (now known as Impact Wrestling), but questionable management decisions and WWE’s aura of post-WCW immunity prevented TNA from becoming a major threat.
Then, in 2019, billionaire Tony Khan teamed up with a select group of wrestlers to found All Elite Wrestling. In May, they did their first pay-per-view, and by October, they had a weekly TV show. The return of wrestling to Turner TV means WWE is no longer the only major sport in town.
But just because AEW performs a similar function in relation to WWE and broadcasts on certain channels doesn’t mean they’re resurgent. There are several important distinctions, so let’s examine them.
AEW is not built on another commercial framework.
The wrestling faction known as the Elite, who then joined New Japan Pro-Wrestling and Ring of Honor, held an event to rival WWE in order to prove they could. This event was titled All In and took place in 2018. Tony Khan partnered with Elite to launch AEW, but the company has evolved into something completely new. Of course, the majority of their talent has previously worked with other major companies, but the entirety of AEW has been built from the ground up.
WCW didn’t start out that way. Ted Turner, the media mogul behind TBS, TNT, Cartoon Network, etc., was too busy reinventing television to build a wrestling business from scratch, so he sold one that was already in place. Throughout the 1980s, Jim Crockett Promotions, a wrestling promotion based in North Carolina, was expanding, and TBS was airing its programming. In 1988, the Crockett family sold a majority stake in Turner, and World Championship Wrestling was established.
With TV’s dads in charge, the product could get a little leaner, but a lot of what made WCW really work for JCP: Ric Flair and the Four Horsemen, Dusty Rhodes, Sting, the annual Starrcade PPV (preceding WrestleMania by using more than one year), and an entire infrastructure dedicated to putting on a weekly wrestling show.
During the mid-1990s, when “WCW Monday Nitro” began competing with “Monday Night Raw,” television ratings were the sole measure of media success. Some fans can catch a show and watch it at a later time, but what really matters is what people watch live. The internet, which was just starting to become a thing for most of the general public, was not fast enough to watch videos. YouTube was nearly a decade away, and streaming services wouldn’t come along until then. There was weekly television, analog pay, and printed periodicals, but that was about it.
It is clear that mass media in the 21st century is quite an extraordinary global phenomenon. Television ratings still matter, but not as much as they once did. For one thing, they’ve been in widespread use for a number of years, as human viewing habits have evolved. Some people only watch online content and never turn on the TV. AEW doesn’t have a local streaming service yet (they’ll likely find one as their media library expands), but they do make heavy use of YouTube. In addition to hosting matches and footage from TV shows, AEW’s YouTube channel also hosts AEW Dark and AEW Dark Elevation, a third and fourth weekly wrestling show showcasing their low cards and developmental talents. Plus, there’s a dependable AEW podcast hosted by legendary commentator Tony Schiavone and fan-favorite referee Aubrey Edwards, something even WCW could not have imagined back in the day.
Owner Tony Khan runs AEW himself, rather than letting guys like Eric Bischoff do it.
Ted Turner was the CEO of WCW, but he wasn’t the day-to-day leader. He wasn’t talented at regular TV tapings, and he never made the cards. He hired individuals, most notably Eric Bischoff, who took control of WCW in 1993, to test these elements. Tony Khan, on the other hand, is adopting a palmistry stance. He is no longer just an owner. He is the person who is there every day, communicating with employees what is expected of them and making sure things are going as he pleases. In that respect, he’s a lot more like wrestling’s greatest micromanager, Vince McMahon, than he is Turner.
Khan, unlike McMahon, not only loves the concept of wrestling, but everything about wrestling in the present day. Unlike Turner, he is all about getting his hands dirty to deliver the best possible professional wrestling performance. And unlike Bischoff, Khan has nothing to prove to others and no interest in uplifting himself. Tony Khan will never join the Blackpool Fight Club the same way Bischoff joined the New World Order. Khan appears on TV only when there is an important international announcement in the real world.
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