Is ROH Accessible?

Columns

Joe Babinsack has an interesting column up at the Wrestling Observer. It’s attempt at providing constructive criticism to ROH in regards to their trouble with attracting new viewers to their PPVs. The first failing he sees on their end, advertising, is something our own Phil Clark has covered, among others. The second criticism he offers is new to me, though:

The second bit of constructive criticism is this:

TOO MUCH!

Ok, it isn’t Vince Russo throwing crap all over the TV, but every single ROH DVD has several great things going for it, but unfortunately, one overwhelmingly bad thing:

Too many wrestlers of note, and too many top quality matches.

Yeah, I know; the criticism of “it’s too good” sounds pretty nuts on first blush, I think he makes some good points. To wit:

The point is simply this. New stars are not going to be made by matching up top notch, world level wrestlers with other top notch, world level wrestlers, when no one in the match is “known” to the audience.

But, put Danielson in with a jobber, and torture that fish with the cattle mutilation, and people will see what Danielson can do.

Really, he’s talking about two forms of accessibility in his critiques here. For someone who’s a comic book afficienado, it’s interesting to see a critique that’s pretty prevalent for the entire medium there also applied to a wrestling company. For someone who’s in the new viewer position for ROH, I can’t say that accessibility of the one show I’ve watched was a problem, but that’s because I’ve followed the coverage provided by Pulse Glazer and the ever growing legion of ROH fans who are contributors here.

However, I can certainly see why accessibility would be a problem if you have no idea who anyone on the show is, and I look forward to seeing how people on both sides of the fence (the ROH hardcore and people just sampling the product) react to it. If nothing else, I do think it succeeds in actually offering up salient points for discussion about what ROH can do to make its product more accessible to new fans.