I don't really care who wins the night since I don't get anything for it, but it's appears that both companies do care about winning the night. NXT has Raw and SmackDown talent in half of the matches (so far anyway) and Dynamite has 3 title matches including a World Title match between Moxley and Hangman that they have built up for about a month now. Does it matter who wins? Well not really, except for those who will spend days gloating about who won the night in the ratings. But that always happens anyway even when shows are not head-to-head, so nothing new I guess.

Nothing either company is doing is that out of the ordinary. AEW pretty regularly features title matches on Dynamite since they don't do PPVs as often (Mox vs Punk was sort of done on Dynamite, Bryan vs Moxley, and Hangman vs Bryan at least once), and NXT has main roster guys pretty regularly, and the biggest star I think so far announced is Rhea.

I mean, I'm sure both companies want to convince viewers on the fence to choose their product, but it's not as if either company is going all out. It's all in good fun if someone wants to gloat if "their" side wins (I'd expect that to be Dynamite since it generally outperformed NXT by enough that I don't think the time slot will change things), but it doesn't really tell us anything about the overall state of things.

In general, I don't think comparing the numbers between the two companies is all that useful. With AEW being new, it shouldn't be expected to be putting up the same numbers as WWE, and I think Tony does his company a disservice by trying to play up the competition. I think at this point the more important figures for NXT which is being relaunched after tanking in the ratings as NXT 2.0 and Dynamite which is still newish is the week over week/month over month/year over year changes for their own shows.

Well I definitely agree that comparing numbers between the two companies is not that useful. I mean one company has been around for decades and has a very loyal fan base, while the other is only three years old and arguably still trying to built it's audience. Sadly, tribalism comes before logical thinking for many people.

While the Monday night wars were fun, nothing like that will happen ever again. In the 90s, it was really hard to follow both, because if your TV was on Raw, you weren't watching Nitro, unless you maybe had a second TV and were taping it.  So it kind of was a zero sum game, especially because it would have cost about 1200 a year to watch all the PPVs for both. Now, channel flipping isn't even a concept anymore. With DVRs and streaming and the WWE PPVs being less than a meal at McDonalds, there's no real reason to choose. If I regularly watched Dynamite and NXT, I'd catch them both this week no problem.

There's only so much wrestling a person can watch in a week, and each company wants more merchandise and engagement, so there's a some competition in that sense, but it's not even close to the existential struggle of the Monday night wars.

Oh yeah I don't think something like the Monday Night Wars will ever happen again, it was the height of professional wrestling's casual fan viewership (among other things). But it seems like tonight both shows are determined to do better than the other, or at least not drop too much in viewership. Hell NXT added Kevin Owens and The Good Brothers (or The OC) to their lineup. At least for one night it will be interesting to see how both shows perform.

I loved bray wyatts first promo. And wwe is so fun these days it feels like a curse has been lifted

The Monday Night Wars also occurred when there wasn’t a lot of competition for pro-wrestling. Most people were still on dial-up internet with time/data caps—no access to video, even Napster wasn’t a thing until late 99. On the much smaller range of TV programming, there wasn’t much media targeting the young adult audience—MTV, South Park, Simpsons, and Sitcoms were about it… and Sitcoms were on their way out. So pro-wrestling kind of transcended it’s usual sports fan audience when they went with more soap-opera type programming.

At the same time, it was a perfect fit for the shock TV era. But pro-wrestling wasn’t just catching onto a fad, they were a big part of popularizing it.

When the reality TV boom hit, WWE was the only relevant company around. Talent show reality TV had been around for about a decade, and was already established on music television by the end of the 1990s, and then Survivor took the world by storm, dating reality shows popped up all over the place, and Pop Idol exploded onto the scene. WWE Tough Enough was late to the party and felt more like a trend-chaser than a trendsetter. That’s why the reality TV era failed to make an impact, while the previous shock TV/Attitude era made a major impact.

A lot of the decline in pro-wrestling isn’t pro-wrestling’s fault. There’s WAY more media competing with it than there was in 1997-2002. The biggest opportunity for a pro-wrestling “war” isn’t on TV, it’s on streaming services. But things have been moving slower than I’d have guessed they would have.

The cinematic matches were a fun experiment during the lockdown era when they couldn't have fans, but there is no reason to keep doing them. Hard to watch someone defend their title in what looks like a high school film class horror movie and then expect us to try and suspend our disbelief for the rest of the show.

I think they have their place. It's just knowing where they are needed and how to do it right. The boneyard match and firefly fun house match couldn't have been better as a traditional match. But forcing them does work. They are required for specific situations just like hell in a cell should be. Don't overuse or misuse them. 

I found the firefly funhouse "match" to be quite good. Should be used sparingly.