On the eve of the one-year anniversary of the Hogan/Bischoff era, is anything better?
Here’s the list of things from the past year that TNA has given us that I like:
An acknowledgement that the TNA title is a cursed item, thereby proving a theory I’ve had about the title for years. The redesign, in my opinion, is pretty great.
That’s it. And most people hate the stupid purple face belt. So that’s zero things for most people.
I’d say objectively you can take three things out of 2010 from TNA:
A pretty solid feud between the Guns and Beer Money.
A fairly decent year for Ken Anderson, a guy you would have written off in 2009 as a finished character.
The year AJ Styles finally learned how to cut a decent interview.
But what did we have to pay to get these things? How many hours of television and PPV were wasted furthering the outdated and irrelevant stories Eric Bischoff and Hulk Hogan presented? Here’s what we lost:
The TNA Knockouts division was once championed as the destination for solid, proud female wrestling. They took the best from the WWE Diva roster and Shimmer and created two and a half years of great matches, characters, and stories, and at the end of 2009 they flushed it all away. We’ve been offered a year of Beautiful People in-fighting and literally nothing else.
The TNA X Division, though hardly coming out of its best days in 2009, was essentially left on Jay Lethal most of the year. He hasn’t had a bad year, per say, but the belt has been relegated to the same status as the WWE Light-Heavyweight title. The belt of course means less than the division, which is, to put it mildly, completely and utterly empty.
The best PPV main event TNA put on in 2009 was a four-way match between Sting, Angle, Styles, and Matt Morgan. Of those four guys, the only one left in the main event scene is Morgan. Can you really say he’s more valuable to the company than Styles?
2010 was the year the roster was shaken up. But does anyone prefer the 2010 roster to the 2009 roster?
At the beginning of 2010, Hogan and Bischoff were given the reigns and championed guys like Jeff Hardy while taking guys like Abyss under their wing, and they were good guys. At the end of 2010, they took the reigns and championed guys like Jeff Hardy while taking guys like Abyss under their wing, but they’re crooked bad guys. I’ve never seen an adequate explanation of this.
There are other things, of course. They continued to place wrestling as entertainment beneath even the most adolescent programming with the Jersey Shore story, and they botched Angle’s top 10 ranking story for no real reason. But there’s one thing above all else that makes 2010 the worst year in TNA history: the wrestling itself stank.
God knows TNA has never been the place to go to watch great stories. They’ve always had this problem of creating pretty good beginnings but never following through. And through the years, fans of TNA have accepted this blind spot and stuck around because, pound for pound, TNA produced more memorable wrestling matches than pretty much anyone else. You can certainly point to WWE’s transitionary period as a help, here. While WWE focused on building Cena, Batista, and Orton in the mid-2000s while sacrificing match quality, TNA fans witnessed the rise of Styles, Joe, Christian Cage, Angle, and even Sting, who could bust out some great stuff when motivated. From 2004 to 2009, TNA had more five-star matches than anyone else. But can you name me one match from 2010 that was even close to anything they put out even a month before Hogan showed up?
Sure, you could say that Genesis 2010 was fairly decent, but Hogan and Bischoff were only kind of involved with that. After that show, it all went to hell. When a wrestling show delivers poorly thought-out stories, terrible roster decisions, and fails to deliver quality wrestling (you know, that thing we show up to see, at the end of the day), you have a recipe for disaster. TNA’s television ratings haven’t moved one blip all year, which tells me that 1.0 is the wrestling audience that will watch anything so long as the word “wrestling†shows up sometimes. These are the people who watched WCW in 2000. These are the people who watched FCW, probably, and likely go to their local indie shows. They just like wrestling regardless of who or what or why. And there’s nothing wrong with these people, but there is something wrong with TNA for believing that these people care about them in any passionate way.
And of course I’m leaving out ReAction, a show that held great promise by me and others who yearned for producers to step back and rethink the way wrestling is displayed, but ultimately failed for a number of reasons. I’ll have more on that another time.
I’m not looking forward to this new year, TNA.
