Thought of the TNA: TNA And Superstables
I started doing some math last night and the numbers are a bit saddening.The first TNA heel superstable was S.E.X. It ran from the winter of 2002 until June of 2003. We’ll call this six months.
After that came the Kings of Wrestling which evolved into Planet Jarrett/Jarrett’s Army. Combining the two, this ran for just shy of two years.
Then came the double stables of Christian’s Coalition and the Angle Alliance. These ran from February of 2007 to April of 2008, or about 14 months.
The Main Event Mafia ran from October of 2008 to approximately October of 2009, giving us another year.
Immortal started October 10, 2010 and ended either October 16, 2011 or April 15, 2012 depending on what you consider their actual ending.
Aces and 8’s has been running for seven months now.
Some quick math tells you that, from a conservative standpoint, TNA has spent over six years running superstable angles. That’s more than half the time they’ve been in existence as a company. To say they’re repeating storylines is an understatement.
Stables are wack. They only ever work when there is some grounding in reality i.e The Kliq (nWo briefly and DX) and the Hart family. I can’t think of another stable that’s actually legitimately worked and not come across like a load of highly-contrived nonsense. The Nation worked for a while, but most stables, esp the TNA ones, seem to have no rhyme or reason and is just another collection of guys designed to cover up AJ Styles lack of mic skills.
To have a legit stable, the leader must be the top 1 or 2 face or heel in the company, and he needs to have at least 1 other top 5 singles wrestler with him. Otherwise no one cares. But you can’t have more than 2, you need some sort of hierarchy. You can’t have like 4 World Title contenders in a stable. Also, you can’t have more than 6ish people in it. You need to know who’s in it, and why they are in it. The nWo was cool when it had Hogan, The Outsiders, Syxx, Giant, Ted, Norton, Bagwell…then…well, a stable needs to be tight.
What’s worse than the constant heel stables is the fact that Immortal is literally the only heel stable to have had any kind of blowoff. All of the other stables just vanished without anything resembling an explanation and the babyfaces never did get their revenge on any of the stables in the end.
That’s another thing TNA has in common with WCW: The heels never get their comeuppance.
True but the nWo from July 1996-February/March 2000 was overkill after awhile. Then you had the spinoffs with the Wolfpac,Black & White,the LWO,etc.
Wow I never realized that,I would say Immortal ended after BFG 2011 when Hogan turned Face even though TNA kept trying to convince everyone they were still around. All they had left was Bully Ray,Gunner,Flair,and Bischoff. Steiner was gone or on his way out,Abyss had turned again,Jeff Hardy just came back from his suspension,and Fortune was long gone and split up by that point.
Would you say both WCW and TNA have the same mindset when it comes to Factions? The constant need for them and always going back to the well for them.
To an extent but often times it was always the Horsemen so it wasn’t a constant turnover of new teams.