The Young Bucks were upset by Top Flight. Saraya and Toni Storm turned heel, giving the AEW women’s division some direction for the first time in, you know, forever.
There was good stuff up and down the card for this week’s “Dynamite.”
What there wasn’t was more than the five-second-long screen card at the beginning of the show paying tribute to the late Jay Briscoe, who died on Tuesday from injuries in a head-on car crash that also left his 9- and 12-year-old daughters with too-numerous-to-count serious injuries.
Briscoe, along with his brother, Mark, won the Ring of Honor tag team titles from FTR at the Dec. 10 “Final Battle” pay-per-view, capping a thrilling trilogy of matches between the two teams that defined tag team wrestling in 2022.
But while basically everybody and everything else associated with the Ring of Honor brand was featured on AEW TV in 2022, the Briscoes never saw the light of day, reportedly because AEW’s TV broadcast partner, Warner Bros. Discovery, put its foot down, for the stupid reason that Jay Briscoe had written a homophobic tweet back in 2013 that he had gone to great pains to try to atone for.
The Briscoes ban makes no sense given everything else that goes unpunished in pro wrestling, and the worlds of sports and culture in general.
But even if the line from Warner Bros. Discovery is that hard-hearted, seriously, the guy died, his kids are in the hospital, will be for weeks.
It’s easy for me to say this, because it’s not my money, but if I’m Tony Khan, I make the whole show a tribute to Jay Briscoe, and if Warner Bros. Discovery uses that to break the broadcast agreement, which I doubt would happen, but surely would be a possibility, whatever, I figure out a way to survive on YouTube until I can get another TV network lined up.
Oh, and I use my dad’s money to sue the absolute sh-t out of Warner Bros. Discovery.
News and Notes
- This week’s show averaged 969,000 viewers, up very slightly from last week’s 967,000 viewer average. The lead-in from “Big Bang Theory” drew 1.197 million viewers for the 8-8:15 p.m. ET segment with Orange Cassidy vs. Jay Lethal. The show stayed at decent number levels (971K+) all the way through the end of the 9-9:15 p.m. ET quarter-hour, which had the end of the Bryan Danielson-Bandido match. The last four minutes of the Toni Storm-Willow Nightingale match, the afterbirth with Storm and Saraya turning heel, then the Ethan Page promo pushed the show all the way down to 853,000 viewers for the 9:30-9:45 p.m. ET segment.
- Top Flight got the upset win over The Young Bucks. Early in AEW history, the Bucks gave an upset win to another young tag team, Private Party, which went on to do nothing with it, and they’re now in the latest of a run of jobber stables. Will Top Flight be able to do something with their win over the EVPs, or was this another one-off?
- Khan did a better job with video packages highlighting angles from recent weeks to keep the interest of fans. For example, AEW world champ Maxwell Jacob Friedman was featured in a scathing backstage heel promo to remind folks of his upcoming title match with Bryan Danielson. Adam Page chatted with Renee Paquette to keep alive his feud with Jon Moxley. A valid criticism of Khan is that his booking was too match-focused, with little or no attention to the fact that weekly TV provides opportunities to kindle ongoing feuds and storylines.
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Chris Graham
