This show was perfectly average for me. Which is not good, considering all the hype and importance of this first show. The setup they have looks pretty good, very 1999 Nitro. I have very mixed feelings about the commentary. While Tony is still a god, and Excaliber and JR are good too, I feel like it's super unnecessary and to an extent detrimental to have 3 guys doing play-by-play who all have similar styles. They seemed to be tripping over each other all night trying to state facts and call the action, and I feel like if they keep this team going forward, they'll really have to learn to benefit from the "less is more" adage. Or perhaps they can either drop one of the guys, or somehow make one of them fully color. The camera work has slightly improved from their last show I watched, but that's not saying hardly anything at all.
The wrestling was all good bordering on great, with the exception of course being Cody. Sammy did look great in that match, though, so obviously I will give him a little credit for that. Pac vs Hangman was probably my match of the night, the women's match was real good, and overall pretty good wrestling top to bottom.
The story telling, which is supposed to be one of their big things or whatever, was pretty standard and quite frankly boring. What's given to us as an alternative wrestling show to the WWE actually somehow felt more like a WWE show than the typical Smackdown does. Why would the "rookie" do the post match "you earned my respect by beating me spot"? One could assume it's because Sammy's supposed to be super cocky, but the commentators never touched on it and Y2Dadbod cut that part short before we could find out. Speaking of Y2Juggalo, the beatdown which, as was already criticized by others above, went about 20 minutes too long xD, was completely pointless and sloppily done. There was absolutely no need for the picture-in-picture for that, as it made it feel about 10 times longer than it already did. Also, insert joke about Jericho losing his belt again, cuz he forgot to grab it when he was walking toward the back, which was odd because at the top of the ramp he should have been holding it up as he was bragging about being the champion.
The awkward and equally unnecessary "celebrity" involvement on the show was lame at best. I'm not really sure why SCU needed to have a video promo leading into a live promo, I felt like they easily could've just accomplished the same thing all in the live promo, and it would have been better because the fans could've reacted to it. And how do you have a mid-match beatdown AND a post-match beatdown within the same match, and both are basically unrelated? Unless I missed the part where Mox and Jeribore are best friends or something. The random attacks (all involving ex-WWE guys, btw
) were just on overkill mode tonight, and really overshadowed two of the most important matches on the show.
So yeah, overall the show was just average. Call me overly-critical, a pessimist, a hater, or whatever else you may, but no one can say I'm not being objective with my opinions for the most part. A big part of why people have been wanting an alternative to the WWE in the first place is because of poor booking and too much non-wrestling nonsense on the shows, most of the wrestling is generally pretty good. AEW gave us... well, more of exactly the same. Hopefully it gets better than this going forward
