they have a show about just promos on youtube.
they actually have 2 if you count "the road to..."
literally no one can ***** about a company having worse writing than WWE.
I'm not counting youtube promos. I mainly mean on the show
WWE spends like 5x the effort on live promos as AEW, and they are clearly making a greater attempt to tell coherent multi week storylines in my opinion, succeed or fail. Since about the time AEW started
- Bayley has meltdown, embraces the meaningless of existence and turns on the fans
- Bryan starts redeeming himself but is torn between going back to Yes Movement or forward
- Brock attacks Rey and his son, Rey gets Cain Valaquez to get revenge for his family. Brock is looking to get Cain back and has been thinking about it for 9 years in kayfabe
- Seth Rollins starts being corrupted by Bray Wyatt being doing a dark thing like burning the funhouse down
- Shorty G embraces his height and being yourself
That's not counting stuff like Braun vs Tyson or Hulk vs Flair which is pretty standard, but not that different from some of AEW's best storylines
Some AEW storylines
- Jericho puts together the Inner Circle and brings in Jake Hager who has mostly just been a thug so far
- Cody got arrested for attacking him in luxury box
- Moxley put Omega through a table, but now is kind of cool with him so he has conflicted thoughts
- Chris from SCU got piledrivered onto the ground so now his teammates have to win the tournament for him
This week was probably the best so far in that department since there was the Jericho/Rhodes scene, Brandi attacked Jaime Hayter, and while I'm confused about their feelings towards each other there was some attempt with Moxley and Omega to build towards their feud. It also set up Moxley and Neville storyline. Before this week I would have said there was very little storytelling attempt made by AEW, just a lot of matches. It is early and it's possible the weeks before Full Gear would ramp up things more. But so far everything that's happened on an AEW show feels like it could have been written the morning of the show. There is nothing that they needed to have it all mapped out 3-4 weeks ago other than possibly SCU and Lucha Brothers facing each other after they hurt their teammate.
An example of a slight tweak to AEW so far
- Jericho's inner circle is countered by a very clear anti-Inner Circle group of faces such as Cody, Dustin, MJF (for now), Paige, Omega, Young Bucks, etc. You have matches every week between these two sides like Dustin facing Guevara, Omega facing Hagar, etc. The storyline of Full Gear is faces vs the Inner Circle basically
- Moxley and Omega feud is made more clear one way or the other. If you want the storyline to be a face in Omega vs a tweener you can't figure out in Moxley, then make it really clear they're both faces like making them team up but with tension, or make Omega tell Mox to his face he doesn't understand which side he's on. Or just turn Mox heel. Right now this feud has kind of gone all over the place with Moxley getting distracted with Pac and Omega with Janella and any heat between them at the moment that led to Mox putting him through a glass table seems to be extinguished.
- Have a better set up for Pac vs Paige. Moxley was the one who led to him and Pac's loss in the tag team. This could have been a way to set up heat with Page instead. Paige challenging him at Full Gear wasn't even on TV. Right now the feud comes off like two guys who needed to face someone to be on the card to me.
- I would have done something like make Britt Baker be friends with Riho their first few matches, then turn on her setting up a match at Full Gear. Right now I'm not sure what the plan is with Riho's match as the only story they set up was with Brandi, and Baker is supposed to be feuding Bea Priestly but is not the champion
I'm not saying they had to do these things, I have enjoyed the show strictly for wrestling, but storytelling is good for ratings as not everyone is a smark. If AEW has a bold clear plan about heel and face not being as cemented and depending on the situation that's fine, but that's a pretty risky style to sell to wrestling audiences except the biggest hardcores.
