Thought Of The Day: Keep Things Moving
There’s a good chance that you’re a fan of NXT. I mean, if you’re not, I don’t really know what else to tell you. It’s one of the best wrestling TV shows ever and can put on good shows in almost any way you ask. One of the key things is their diversity, which you can see in their main events, especially as of late. Here are the last four TV main events:
December 19 – Johnny Gargano vs. Aleister Black
December 12 – Ricochet vs. Tyler Breeze
December 5 – Shayna Baszler vs. Dakota Kai
November 28 – Lars Sullivan vs. Keith Lee
That’s a cage match with a brutal backstory, an athletic spectacle in the midcard, a hard hitting women’s match and two hosses hitting each other really hard. They’re four very different kinds of matches with eight different people instead of the same thing you see so often on Raw or Smackdown. There isn’t some main event group that dominates most of the shows and commentary treats whatever the main event of the week is as the most important thing in the world. It’s certainly not something unique to NXT, but no other company does it as often or as well.
It’s also much easier I would imagine to produce an hour of a show each week versus like 6 or so for the main roster. Plus you can swap people so nobody overstays their welcome. We saw Ciampa vs Gargano 3 times this year but they were spread apart and it made sense for their feud versus seeing some combination of Owens/Jericho vs Rollins/Reigns or Charlotte vs Sasha every single week like we did a couple years ago because they simply couldn’t come up with anything else.
NXT has been the true saving grace of WWE in 2018. SmackDown, for the most part, has been a solid to good show for much of the year while Raw has easily had the worst year of this decade, some say in the entire history of the show. I personally think that was about 2009 but that’s neither here nor there.
From an overall quality standpoint, NXT has become the brand, show, whatever you want to call it that can be consistently relied on for quality feuds, matches, interesting storylines and just about everything else that’s important to modern fans. If you prefer “Sports Entertainment”, then NXT is not for you and you’re better off just watching Raw. In NXT, you won’t see dance offs, wrestlers stopping in the middle of matches to gyrate like they’re at the club, wrestlers starting fights over a dislike/disrespect of pancakes, etc.. I could keep going on but the quickest way is to think of the various problems that continuously plague the main roster and imagine a WWE related entity in which those problems are virtually nonexistent; that’s what NXT is when you get right down to it.