I watched the CM Punk segment, but I think I'll watch all of Collision when I have a chance. I've been out of the loop for pro-wrestling for a while. This seems like a good place to get back into it.

Wait... WTF? Maybe there are two shows I should be watching.

I hate everything to do with Punk right now.

If it's all sincere then I can't stand him. Drama follows him everywhere. when he was in WWE and bitching about everything it was easy to think 'oh, WWE is huge, he's probably right. Yeah, fight the power'. But then he goes to AEW and pulls the same shit? Naw, problem lies with punk.

And if it's all a work, I don't like it either. Just comes across as whiny, petulant man-children in a schoolyard 'I know you are but what am I?' fight.

I don't like any of it. No matter the angle. I can't stand it. Punk needs to go the fuck away or grow the fuck up. This rebel punk persona is fine when you're 19 and just learning how cool it feels to properly rebel against your parents, not something a 46 year old professional needs to be doing.

I agree with you on Punk. I remember when he had his problems with the WWE, I could not understand how someone who had so much success with them could bitch so much. Then I listened to his interview with Colt Cabana (who is his mortal enemy now), and I sympathized with him. WWE has done a ton of shitty things to wrestlers so it was easy to believe him.

Now how do I feel about him? Dude is clearly the problem, or at least a big part of it. He is worse than a teenager who takes everything you say to them as a massive personal attack (and I would know about that since I work at a high school).

I can't say I'm happy he is back, especially with fans now taking sides. AEW has not even fully recovered from his media scrum nonsense, and now he is splitting fans on which show or wrestles they will support. I don't think he is worth the hassle.

I think the thing is that Vince likes Bron Breaker alot. Obviously, because he is a jacked motherfucker with a family tie to the business. And HHH is still passionate about NXT. So, it's a situation where both of their interests align.

I've tried to get into NXT, but there's just too much wrestling. In some sense I think that's part of WWE's strategy. Make enough content that fans who like your stuff will be satiated and won't need to go elsewhere to get more wrestling.

I didn’t find Punk’s promo whiny at all. It was a good promo. Your post on the other hand? It looks like a lot of projection.

And seriously? Complaining about drama and feuds? In pro-wrestling? Come on! You’re acting like the line “The only thing softer than you are the wrestlers you like” really got to you. It’s wrestling! Don’t take it personally. Calm down :D

Anyway, onto what I came here to write:

I watched Collision, and I watched a good portion of RAW—more than half?

Collision was better booked, better paced, had better matches, and without all the bloat. RAW had its moments: Tomasso Ciampa’s match was great! A nice quick match to kick off the show - and the Balor beat down was cool too. Then after like another hour, the most interesting thing to happen is to see Dunne save a segment that started off half-decent with Logan Paul, but I felt ran a little long for what it was trying to achieve. My big problem was the bloat and the mini-matches. I think a fast one to kick off the show is a nice teaser for the night, but to make ALL the matches 1-3 minutes? I felt a sharp pang of disappointment when Shelton Benjamin and Cedric Alexander were stomped (but that opening knee was killer)—I guess they’re jobbers now. I’m sure the main event was a little longer, but I quit before I got there. There was so much brand self-promotion fluffing up the show that I’m wondering if some of the UFC guys have crossed over to WWE production staff? The show seemed promising at first, then floundered. It had the huge spark of potential, though, so I’ll try again next week to see if it picks up.

Collision was a far more solid show. Well booked, well paced, and lean. The crowd was a lot more explosive than the WWE crowd. And while it’s not saying much, but AEW’s matches and promos were all superior to the matches and promos on WWE.

AEW has fixed one things that’s been problematic for me when I watched it last year and the year before. In the past, the show was often incoherent and the “main event” didn’t feel like the main event because of a complete lack of driving anticipation; often the “this is what I’ve been waiting for” moment of the show was MJF cutting a promo, or a match much earlier in the show, or nothing at all. Collision felt like a proper show, the opening promo did its job driving the show and firing up the crowd, making the show feel exciting, and the main event actually felt like the main event.

I’ll be watching AEW again this week.

NXT was more or less my favourite wrestling show in the last 20 years, before it moved to two hours. Great matches were part of it, but I can understand that it’s not everyone’s taste. I really like good promos too, I love CM Punks and MJFs, some of the best of all time has come from them.

I’m going to give NXT another go once I figure out a good place to start.

I agree with a lot of the criticism on Raw but what I would say is that pretty much every match tied into an ongoing story. So, while I certainly wouldn't claim Alpha Academy vs the Viking Raiders was a better match than Andrade vs Buddy Matthews, the former did tie in to an ongoing story and push it forward a bit, while the latter was just a match between two guys for no real reason. Of course, they seemed to have something on the end to build on it, so we'll see how that goes. Generally though, I appreciate how, especially since H "took over" the booking, pretty much every match or segment is part of some ongoing story. Not all great stories, but at least there's something. 

But yeah, there are a lot of matches that seem short and kind of pointless as matches. It's a general pattern, but it tends to be especially problematic when WWE has something like Money in the Bank coming up because they wind up doing a lot of qualifier matches, and those tend to be short because of how many have to be done. 

I would say honestly that it's kind of pointless to watch Raw if you don't plan on watching WWE's PPVs. The weekly TV shows really do serve mainly to build up to those, where the big matches happen. Not saying there's never good matches on Raw, but you should generally just expect 2 or 3 of them per show. I tend to like this booking model (although they sometimes take it way too far as was the case this week), but definitely not for everyone. If you're going to watch only one WWE show right now, I'd definitely say Smackdown is stronger. It's still a really story heavy show, but the main story right not is just a lot better. 

I'm obviously not saying I'm opposed to great matches, but I really need to be following the story to fully appreciate them. If you're an anime fan, just imagine watching a fight scene from a show without having watched the episodes leading up to it. It's probably still going to be cool to watch, but it won't have the same resonance. So, watching wrestling sporadically would be like just watching all the fight scenes of an anime which won't quite do it for me. I'm really only going to follow a show if I could do it regularly, and just don't have enough time in the week to do that for NXT. 

I agree on CM Punk, but I really don't quite get it with MJF. It's a lot of classic heel schtick and he does it really well, but I don't see anything that would put him on the level of someone like Punk in terms of mic skills. 

I wasn't complaining about the promo, I was complaining about Punk himself. The whole saga. All the backstage nonsense culminating in what we see now. I just don't like it. I don't like him. I don't like his attitude. I don't like his pretentious holier than thou attitude. If it was all an act (like MJF....I hope) then it'd be great character work, but I don't get the impression it's an act. It's him. And it's honestly kind of pathetic. 

Being a great heel is hard, but there's a difference between being a heel and playing one on TV. 

Ratings for Collision are in for people who care about that sort of thing.

Just above 800,000, which I think is decent in context. It's a bit lower than what Dynamite has been doing, but it's on a worse night, and without an audience conditioned to tune in at that time. So, I think that should be on the higher end of what AEW could have reasonably hoped for.

I expect the rating will go down next week to somewhere between 730 and 770k. Not because it was a bad show, but because it's only the first episode once. Some people who checked it out like Jumpin will come back, and others like me will have had their curiosity satisfied. From there, if they put on a show of that consistent quality, I think they can build back up to that 800,000 and maybe beyond. To get beyond that into the million plus territory, I think they need some kind of Xfactor. At this point, Punk is not it. He has his audience, but I can't see droves of new fans coming in. They need to find someone to fill those boots.