•
I don’t need to tall you about how amped I was for this week’s dog collar match between Brodie Lee and Cody Rhodes—I already wrote a whole article about it. Instead, lets place the focus of this week’s introduction where AEW wants it, despite booking a dog collar match on the same show—Chris Jericho’s…
•
AEW gave us three hours of Dynamite this week, a largely consequence-free hour of “Late Night Dynamite” tagged to the end of the NBA playoffs on Tuesday, and the regular two hour show on Wednesday night. “Consequence-free” is not a criticism—I was raised on weekend wrestling, one hour WCW shows on TBS and syndicated…
•
It’s not easy to like All Elite Wrestling at the moment. In fairness, it’s not easy to like wrestling at all in 2020, no matter how few fans are in the building or how many precautions a promotion takes to prevent the spread of COVID-19 among their staff and locker room, but beyond all…
•
AEW Dynamite aired live on Thursday this week, pre-empted by a slate of NBA Playoff games that did not happen. In response to the shooting of Jacob Blake, an unarmed Black man who was shot seven times by Kenosha, Wisconsin police officer Rusten Sheskey, the Milwaukee Bucks opted to sit out their game against…
•
Last week, Eddie Kingston challenged Cody Rhodes for the TNT Championship, and that’s pretty much the best thing that’s happened in American wrestling this summer. You can read Martin’s recap from last week, listen to LB and Danielle talk about it on the Fanfyte podcast, and take a brief detour with me to see…
•
Look. We’re far enough into the reality of this pandemic that the idea of “essential workers” and “front lines” have become part of everyday speech. We don’t flinch at them, though we should—when we talk about essential workers like cashiers and janitors as “being on the front lines,” we’re talking about sending people into…
•
Week to week, it’s kind of difficult to figure out a way to contextualize an episode of AEW Dynamite. We’re long past the point where there’s something novel about there being another wrestling show on a major broadcast network, and everyone has decided to push the potential consequences of wrestling during a pandemic where…
•
It is hard to know where to begin this review of AEW Dynamite. Fanfyte took last month off of regular coverage of televised wrestling as a means of responding to WWE and AEW’s decisions to shoot live shows during a pandemic. That pandemic is still a going concern, and watching wrestling under these circumstances…
•
You may not know this from Fanfyte VCR or any of the non-COVID-19 related wrestling coverage I’ve done during These Uncertain Times, but I feel like my enjoyment of professional wrestling—current American professional wrestling at least—is at an inflection point. WWE isn’t just bad—they’re an active blight on American culture. AEW is dealing with…
•
With Blood & Guts postponed on account of pandemic, AEW Dynamite this week was a hodgepodge of matches and ideas that weren’t part of the show’s narrative plan. This being the second week of Dynamite in an empty football practice facility, it’s pretty notable as to how far scaled back the production was this…