I like TNA. I like the talent, I like the matches, I like the potential. However, I do not watch TNA at all. I probably could, I mean, it’s summer time which means that my Thursday night shows are all in reruns but, well, that would require me setting up a recording for Impact. That would require me to watch Impact. That would require me to groan and shake my head and ask myself why the hell I’m watching it, just like the last time I quit watching TNA. It pains me, like actually pains me, to see so much squandered potential when it comes to something I love. I get frustrated at bad comic book stories, and I get frustrated with blockbuster movies that fail to engage, and I get frustrated with shitty booking.
I get frustrated that TNA has an amazing roster of young talent with tons of potential, where the sky is literally the limit, and they don’t know what to do with them. That the X Division could be something truly unique, and at times has been, and yet they seem content to treat it as if it is a lower card division. I remember AJ Styles vs Samoa Joe vs Christopher Daniels for the X Division Title headline a PPV and being called one of the best matches of the decade, and now the division is lucky to get a singles match on the undercard of a PPV. Sure, keystone X Division workers are all over the card, but to look at the recent Slammiversary; we had Kazarian (an X Division notable) against Kurt Angle in a match that was hardly viewed as an X Division match, and the same thing goes for the Jay Lethal vs AJ Styles match, despite both workers being famous in the Division. It’s become an afterthought when it used to be the biggest selling point of a show with a predictable and over booked main event.
I get frustrated that despite being in business for eight years, and on national television for five, that the audience doesn’t seem to have grown since the initial move to Spike TV. I remember it being a big deal with Impact got a 1.1 rating. A 1.1 for their A show, their only show. NXT gets a 1.1. For as much as the NXT angle matters right now, does the show? Did ECW when it was getting similar ratings? No, they didn’t, and TNA should take notice of the fact that they’re at war with WWE’s B show and they aren’t even airing against each other. TNA went to Monday’s and got absolutely killed, proving that they weren’t cultivating an audience. Is it because of the booking? Maybe to a degree, but all a hot angle is going to do is draw some WWE viewers over to check it out if the sheets mention it. TNA needs to do more than borrow the WWE’s audience though, they need to create a TNA audience. And the best way to do that is to go out and make one.
TNA needs to do a real and actual tour. They need to do Impact on the road, not in the Impact Zone every week, where they draw the same fans who don’t pay them a dime since it’s located at a theme park. They run house shows and some PPV’s on the road, and those obviously do well enough to warrant that they continue them, so why not put Impact out there? Why not get the show on the road and do one Impact a week at a different arena, in a different city, in a different state, that is not Orlando, Florida? You could still tape a show every Monday and air it on Thursday, or just go all of the way and run a weekly show every Thursday, which I can guarantee would draw more viewers as reading spoilers really takes you out of the necessity of actually watching. I know plenty of people that would watch Impact more often if they didn’t know what was going to happen, instead of just tuning in if they hear buzz around a particular moment on the show and then trying to time their viewer-ship to just see that one moment. Get rid of that, put the show on live every week from a different city. Having been to a WWE house show lately I can tell you that even they do an almost incomparable amount of more business with live TV, or even taped TV. House shows don’t draw the same crowds, they aren’t must watch, and while they’re fun, nothing important happens on them ninety-nine percent of the time.
At first this would probably only give the rating a bit of a boost, as the show is on a night where the only other wrestling is Superstars, and I don’t even know if I get WGN, and I know I don’t get it in HD. So I might even check out a live Thursday Impact as opposed to recording reruns of 30 Rock and Community. And if they could give me a hook, and a show that didn’t feel like WWE lite, I might stick with it.
I was a TNA fan back when Impact debuted on Fox Sports Midwest, and I watched it every time it didn’t get bumped for a Cardinals game or….well, anything they could use to bump it, it happened a lot. I liked it, it was different, it was more athletic, it was a different style altogether. I kept watching when it was on Spike on Thursdays for a while, I mean, they picked up Christian and Angle, and they were home growing guys like AJ and Joe. The show was entertaining, not usually great, but it was entertaining. I didn’t watch it every week, as spoilers had a habit of getting read out of boredom and shows were typically deemed as non-essential, and eventually I quit watching TNA altogether. I gave it another shot around the time Hogan came in, and I just found myself shaking my head; mainly at the abuse of talent.
They signed Jeff Hardy. Yes, it was after a drug arrest, but it was also after he became a multi-time WWE World Heavyweight Champion, when he left a company at the peak of his popularity. When he was selling tickets and moving merchandise and making a lot of people a nice amount of money. Jeff Hardy could be a ratings booster, he could be a money tree, and he’s doing nothing for their business. Why? Because they aren’t promoting Jeff Hardy, they’re promoting Hulk Hogan and Ric Flair. Jeff is there, sure, and he’s on the show, and he’s cool, and everybody still loves him, so why aren’t they capitalizing on him? Is it because of the drugs thing, because I mean, come on, WWE knew he was on something and that he left because he was on something, he’s Jeff Hardy. One look at that man is all it takes to tell you that he loves weed, and probably does recreational cocaine. But he’s still money. If he was in the WWE right now he’d be in the main event and they’d have t-shirts, hats, DVD’s, pictures, jerseys, pendants, all of that crap at every merchandise stand at every show in the country, and they would sell like hot cakes.
He’s more marketable than a 56 year old Hulk Hogan who is well past anything resembling his prime.
The World Champion is the ultra charismatic Rob Vam Dam, and that’s a good thing. Rob is awesome; he’s an amazing talent with exceptional ability and he just oozes charisma. He should be their world champion, he should be main eventing their pay per views, he should NOT be doing it with Sting!
That’s what I call a WCW mistake, taking your older established talents and working them in all over the card because you need people to draw. Sting has tried to make stars, Angle has tried to make stars, Flair has probably done what he could given his over sixty limitations, but what they need to do is, and this doesn’t refer to Angle, is step away. Sting is always going to be Sting, and Flair is always going to be Flair. Just like Hogan will always be Hogan, and the Undertaker will always be the Undertaker. These are famous names, well known by mot every audience. There are dozens of them, literally, and very few seem to do the right thing when the time comes (though I suspect Taker will) and just hang up their boots and let the business go.
Most of the big name vets that TNA has brought in are the same guys that WCW banked on, and that alone should tell you something is wrong. WCW proved that name value talents is not what brings in all of the ratings and ticket sales, that they’re nice to bolster a card, but there needs to be more. What WWE does is they have their well known guys situation through out the card, but they’re on par with the other guys. That isn’t to say that Wade Barrett is in contention with Cena as an equal, or that Dolph Ziggler should be listed with The Undertaker; rather it’s to say that a midcard WWE guy, despite name value and length of their stay, is still a midcard guy. Dustin Rhodes has been using the Goldust gimmick off and on for almost fifteen years now and people acknowledge that he’s a veteran, that he’s been around for a while and he knows what he’s doing, but if he loses a match to the Miz it isn’t going to hurt him, and it isn’t going to help Miz. But Evan Bourne beating established main event Chris Jericho elevated him just like Kofi Kingston’s win over Randy Orton.
They got wins over established guys, did a program with them, and then moved on to other people. They were upset wins, and the workers were booked well enough to get the rub. That’s how you do it. Sheamus beating Triple H, that’s how you do it, you push the young guy over the old guy as a stepping stone to something else. You finish the feud and leave the young guy elevated, you don’t fall back on your old veterans to carry your company. They can’t, they couldn’t in WCW when the company folded and half of TNA’s upper card worked there, and they couldn’t when they went to WWE afterwards (except for Jarrett), and they can’t now. It’s not mean, it’s the truth. These guys have drawn plenty in their days, but that’s a long time ago, and the luster is gone. Nobody is paying to see Kevin Nash and Scott Hall anymore, and Hulkamania doesn’t draw what it used to. Those should not be their focus, I mean, Scott Hall obviously isn’t because he got laid off by TNA AGAIN, which is another lesson they need to learn.
STOP HIRING PEOPLE THAT SCREW YOU AROUND!
When have Scott Hall and Sean Waltman ever brought anything to TNA’s table other than no-shows and unexplained absences? Neither of them is there now, how about we keep it that way? If anyone else brings nothing to the table, let them go as well!
They have this amazing pool of younger workers that are just waiting for a chance. Give it to them, let them do their thing. Let them work with veterans under the age of forty-five if they have to work with veterans, and start making the homegrown talent mean more than WWE cast offs. If they got laid off by the WWE, there is in most cases a good reason for it, and it should not be seen as your gain if said reason was in fact good. They were fortunate with Christian and Angle and the Dudley Boys that they could all still go and that they were all eager to help make TNA better then it was. Heck, they could be fortunate again by signing Shelton Benjamin and Carlito, guys who were criminally underutilized in the WWE that could truly come into their own in TNA.
Like many have before them; people like Christian, Ron Killings, Tomko, Gail Kim, Scott Steiner (who proved he could still go after a horrible WWE run), and Team 3D. Being from the WWE isn’t a bad thing at all, but they shouldn’t book around the fact that some guys have had more exposure and thus are better, they should book around the fact that the better worker is the better worker, and however storylines are written to detail it. It’s basic pro-wrestling, we whine and complain that WWE always does the same stuff, IT WORKS! They create talent! They maintain a consistent rating week in and week out on all of their shows while guys come and guys leave. Sure, they bank on the veteran names, but how many months a year does Taker take a vacation? How many breaks does Triple H take? And do the ratings go down when they’re gone? Nope.
TNA isn’t exactly doing better ratings now then they were pre-Hogan, which should tell you that in this day and age there needs to be something more. So move forward, create something new. Accent the tag teams, the X Division, the women, the things that the WWE casually includes into their programming. Make a unique product that doesn’t feel like WWE lite, and people will get interested. Create must see TV by taking the show live, and create an expanded interest by taking the show on the road and cultivating markets outside of Universal Studios. Scale back on the use of name talent that can’t work, and focus more on talent that has ability but no names. Create the names. They did it with AJ Styles, they did it with Samoa Joe, they did it with Abyss and they sure as hell can do it with the Motor City Machine Guns, Kazarian, and Jay Lethal.
There is so much potential, and so much that could be awesome, and I’m just frustrated that it has to be like that. I want a viable second organization that is an alternative to the WWE instead of trying to be WWE. Killed WCW faster, you know, bringing in Russo and trying to emulate Raw with every Nitro, it turned off the core fanbase who stuck around because WCW wasn’t WWF. And I mean, we saw on the first three hour live Monday Impact that there is definitely an audience for wrestling out there beyond what the WWE pulls in every Monday, that there are former fans that would love to tune in and see something they like, but who don’t watch the WWE because that isn’t what they want.
Why not think about impressing them, TNA? Why not think about drawing in the fans who don’t watch wrestling because they don’t like the WWE, and do something unique enough to generate interest amongst them.
Create an audience, and then be successful. It works so much better than trying to be your competition in an attempt to siphon off theirs, because it just doesn’t work, and history has proven that.
And that, my friends, is a Shade of Grey.
