Show Reviews
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Two Miles of Chain But Not That Horny: WWE Elimination Chamber Recap and Review
The Elimination Chamber is a ridiculous concept. We’ve had it for 18 years now, and while it’s capable of generating drama (which we’ll get to later), the TWO MILES OF CHAIN and FOUR LEXAN PODS and the, uh, REGULATION WRESTLING RING are all kind of rote at this point. You’ve seen people get thrown into…
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Slipping Blue Chew Into My Skinny Latte: AEW Dynamite Recap
Dynamite rolled into Atlanta this week, Cody Rhodes’ hometown and one of the most significant wrestling cities in America. That concept—individual cities being wrestling hotbeds—has largely been lost to the sands of time (the exceptions being New York and Chicago), but Atlanta’s roots run very, very deep, and the card AEW put out in their…
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A Free Tooth Extraction For the Good of Public Health: AEW Dynamite Recap
AEW has a lot going on lately. Hangman Page is drunk all the time. The Dark Order are, for some reason, trying to recruit Christopher Daniels. People keep losing eyes. Britt Baker is stomping out teeth. Oh, and MJF whipped Cody Rhodes with a belt on live television. With all of that going on and…
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All This and Unlimited Ice Cream: AEW Dynamite Recap at Sea
AEW ran a show on a boat, y’all. In the grand tradition of wrestling at malls, junkyards, motorcycle rallys, military bases, nightclubs, and New York City subway stations, last night’s Dynamite was part of the festivities at Chris Jericho’s Rock ‘n Wrestling Rager at Sea Part Deux: Second Wave, on tape delay from a cruise…
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Wednesday Night War Week 13: Here’s Some Money, Go See a Star War
Wrestling and Christmas—they go together like legs and feet. Holidays are kind to wrestling in general. They’re days when American families eat heavy meals at 2:00 in the afternoon and stagger out into the bleak grey afternoon looking for something to do. Movie theaters are open on Christmas. Companies like WWE run a loop of…
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Wednesday Wrestling Week 12: Coming to you in glorious picture-in-picture
At the risk of repeating myself, I want to talk a little about commercial breaks and their function in wrestling in an era where advertisers are so desperate to be seen that they’re willing to share space with what they used to interrupt. NXT made a big deal about running Finn Bálor and Adam Cole…
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Wednesday Night War Week 11: When “fine” is enough
Sometimes a wrestling show is just a wrestling show. Given the need to make everything meaningful and worth the time one is asked to invest in it, it sometimes works to the advantage of a reviewer to find significance where there isn’t any, to make an ordinary night seem like the greatest night in history,…
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Wednesday Night War Week 10: Cults, Cults, and More Cults
Two hours is a long time. I know that the last seven years of three hour Raws and six hour supershows have changed the perception of how time works within the boundaries of a wrestling event, but a lot can happen in 120 minutes, and between NXT and AEW, Wednesday night tends to be when…
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NXT WarGames 2019 Recap & Review
I would like to go on the record and state that the WarGames cage match is the best thing that’s ever been invented. Sure, boring people might choose something more practical, like the wheel or electricity or hormone replacement therapy, but look—none of those were invented by Dusty Rhodes. Rather than a world where The…
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Wednesday Night War Week Eight: Non-stop Bangers
Y’all ever stop to think about how good professional wrestling is? I mean, sure it’s a terrible cesspool of weird boomer energy, a medium of entertainment that thrives on manufacturing and disavowing controversy on a minute-to-minute basis, but beyond the crushing despair of constant exposure to the flaws of humanity there is this: few things…