[Tom Guycott]

Originally Posted by screech I feel like this is a problem in modern rasslin. The company thinks cramming as many people onto the card as possible means the show will be great.

Originally Posted by Mr. Nerfect WWE have moved away from that over the past 18 months or so. Now their shows often have like 6 matches.

Two extremes of a similar problem.

Going back in time quite a bit, part of the reason for Smackdown! even coming into existence... shit, part of the reason why RAW went from one hour to two permanantly was to get more people on TV and supposedly get more of them over. But each time, what eventually happened was they would just feature the "over" people for longer periods of time. One hour RAW used to have 3-4 matches. Then, they'd do the occasional "extra hour" and bump up to about 6 or 7. After the two hours became permanant, they somehow trickled back down to about 4 matches, and got in more skits and commercials. Current 3 hour RAW is now about the same content wise as the original 1 hour RAW. The only thing that salvages Smackdown (which at one point suffered the same fate, just on a different day) is that they're still doing the brand split, so there are at least different people there, but it's still pretty much the same people week to week with nearly ceaseless, overproduced talking.

AEW, on the other hand, will overexpose 1 or two "hot, new" talent, but still rotate a cast of about 1/3 of their very bloated roster on Dynamite, and a different 1/3 on Rampage with no rhyme or reason and end up making EVERYONE white noise- expendable and interchangable and just there. They supposedly try to make you care about someone, then that someone disappears for months at a time. Poof, just suddenly not on TV anymore. While there's (comparably) less talking than WWE, they also skimp on the storytelling period. X and Y have a match. Excalibur mentions that they had a match 7 years ago in Japan. Y beats X, and you never hear about either of them having any history ever again. Y might get two more wins on TV like he's building to some sort of title match feud, then fucks off for six months. Nobody's even asking where Y is after a couple weeks, because nobody remembers Y works for AEW.

So you end up with either something like WWE with the whole Bloodline thing (not knocking it because it's entertaining and intriguing, but the point of this is to illustrate exactly how much time that particular drama eats up multiple segments of TV time every week when it doesn't need to and still get the same positive response), or AEW with clusterfucks upon clusterfucks of random people, random stables, matches, and titles that makes the East Palestine Train Derailment* look like a two car fender bender.

There's got to be a happy medium where Vince's folks showcase a little more than the same 10 people between 2-3 hours of commercial breaks that might have some matches in between because "ugh, I guess we have to this is obstensibly a wrestling program", and where Tony pops a little more Ritalin and maybe pares down the scope instead of splooging interchangeable folks having 15 minutes bouts everywhere all the time to where nobody has the ability to care about any of them.

*I'm kinda tired of people saying "Ohio Train Fire". Way too impersonal, like the place is too nondescript to even mention. Just say the name of the town like pretty much any other disaster... but maybe I feel that way because it's about 20 miles from me.