Thursdays For Guys Who Like Thursdays

FOR THOSE WHO haven’t heard, Spike TV’s Thursday night lineup is now built around TNA’s Impact Wrestling at 8pm, followed by two hours of Bellator Fighting Championships from 10pm to 12am. Impact and Bellator are both distant seconds to their A-level industry counterparts (WWE and UFC, respectively), and both of those counterparts did their own time on Spike before leaving for greener pastures.

In the mind of the casual fan and viewer, professional wrestling IS WWE and mixed martial arts IS UFC, so neither WWE nor UFC is likely to be supplanted by Impact Wrestling or Bellator in the forseeable future, or ever, but for those who appreciate a bit of variety in the ever mono-branded landscape of mindless American entertainment, it’s nice to have alternatives.

Impact Wrestling (and the TNA promotion generally speaking) has had a rocky history, running the gamut from mediocre to horrible and back again. Of course, the same can be said for WWE, but unlike WWE, TNA hasn’t had the WWE’s occasional high points of greatness.

Still, after a creative shakeup last year and minus a few setbacks/bumps in the road, Impact has slowly turned into something resembling a solid pro wrestling program, and lately I’ve been enjoying it more than WWE’s product. Sure, Impact Wrestling doesn’t have anything as compelling as the CM Punk/Paul Heyman tandem (or the elusive sightings of Brock Lesnar) on WWE television, but there’s a lot more to sink one’s teeth into on the mid and lower card.

As current reasons to watch Impact, I’ve got Jesse Godderz, Chris Daniels, Frankie Kazarian, Bully Ray, Austin Aries, Bobby Roode, Kurt Angle, and probably others who aren’t coming to mind right now. With WWE, other than Punk, I’ve got nothing. So Impact Wrestling, while not as great as WWE when it’s great, isn’t a bad time-sink to numb the pain on a Thursday evening.

Meanwhile, Bellator Fighting Championships has moved over to Spike from MTV 2, bringing a polished mixed martial arts production to weekly cable TV. Bellator is certainly no UFC, but it doesn’t come across as amateur hour, either, and while its stars aren’t anywhere near the caliber of a GSP or Anderson Silva, Bellator has enough big personalities to make for an enjoyable whiling away of one’s life on a Thursday night.

Ben Askren, for instance, with his heat magnet curls and his “boring” yet unstoppable “lay and pray” attack is one of the better heels going in the business today, and “King” Mo Lawal is pure star material at whatever he does. Further, the tourament format employed by Bellator helps to give a sense of focus to the proceedings and provides a hook for otherwise faceless fights and fighters.

In any case, while some people seem to hate this B level kind of stuff on principle, I’m all for it. I like a little mixup on the horizon once in awhile, and what the else am I going to do on a Thursday night? Video games, I guess? But that’s what Friday mornings are for. So, if you enjoy pro wrestling or mixed martial arts, OR if you enjoy both (as of course, you should), do yourself a favor and hit up Spike TV one of these Thursday nights. I guarantee you might like it. Maybe.

Thoughts on TNA Impact Wrestling, 5/24/12

I ENJOYED last week’s 5/17/12 episode of TNA Impact Wrestling, and since I’ve put WWE’s Raw and Smackdown on the back burner for a bit, it ended up being the last weekly pro wrestling show I watched until its 5/24 follow-up.

So, when I turned on Impact last night my anticipation was “high.” “High” in the sense that I hoped to passively enjoy the show while half-paying attention, as opposed to having it on in the background for the comfort of its ritualistically habitual noise.

The results were…confusing?

This is the first “Open Fight Night/Gut Check” episode of Impact I’ve tuned in to watch, and I’m not sure what to think. While I reservedly applaud TNA’s experimentation with new/different ways to present televised pro wrestling–and this concept certainly isn’t as bad as some they’ve sprung in the past–it’s still not nearly as effective as the simple show they pulled off to reasonable effect last week.

The good? The “reality show” segments with Hogan mulling over Bully Ray, Jeff Hardy, Kurt Angle, and AJ Styles as participants in the World Title match, and the “Open Fight Night” challenges where the roster was seen hanging around in the back, waiting to hear who’d called out who, both added to the feel that the Impact roster is a group of competitors questing for titles and in-ring prestige. It sounds so obvious, but I rarely feel this way when watching WWE, where the roster feels more like a collection of performers each doing their own individual act.

I haven’t seen the amount of angst expressed over title contendership as I saw during the Hogan segments in as long as I can remember. Similarly, the open challenge scenes reminded us that the wrestlers are on the show to fight and position themselves closer to the top of the card. Again, something that too often slips through the cracks in WWE and TNA.

Still, the Hogan segments, with their wannabe-“Apprentice” camera angles and sound effects, ultimately felt distracting, and had me longing for the less-frilled approach to the same thing (title contendership) that went down last week.

Similarly, the backstage roster scenes, while on the verge of effectiveness, teetered off that verge due to a lack of properly defined characters with understandably motivated relationships.

In a super hero comic, for instance, when you get a room full of heroes and villains together, each character is so well defined that you know exactly what they think of one another, and as you watch them interact amongst themselves in ways that make sense, their universe feels all the more consistent and real.

This same effect could totally (and should totally) happen on a wrestling show, but instead, more often than not, the wrestlers look confused and awkward, milling around aimlessly side by side.

The “Open Fight Night” locker room shots were nowhere near as bad as those times when WWE shows the Raw and Smackdown rosters sitting together in matching t-shirts, the heels backslapping and guffawing with the faces of the same brand, but it still failed unnecessarily where it could have easily been successful.

“Gut Check” was a total afterthought and neither here nor there for me. I guess it’s kind of cool that there’s now a forum to see indie notables like Joey Ryan on Impact, and Austin Aries was awesome in this match, but, in the end, “whatever.” Again, TNA goes for gimmickry where fundamentals would suffice.

The title match was fine, but I was pretty fatigued from all the novelties and experimental formats leading up to it.

In the end, I didn’t like this episode of Impact, but I didn’t hate it. Although I’ll watch again next week, my enthusiasm has dimmed considerably since last time. The bells and whistles are fine, especially since none of them were that offensive in and of themselves, but please, lock down the fundamentals first. Oh, also, any appearance of Garrett Bischoff on my screen makes me want to never watch again (even though I totally will).

p.s. Best bell and/or whistle in recent-ish Impact memory was the ranking system they had instituted for a minute some time back. That was cool.

Thoughts on TNA Impact Wrestling 5/17/12, Lack of Thoughts on WWE Smackdown 5/18/12, Ring of Honor TV 5/20/12, and WWE Raw 5/21/12

SO AWHILE BACK–I can’t remember how far back, since the weeks and months tend to blur together, especially when it comes to pro wrestling programming–TNA put on a string of pretty good Thursday night Impact shows. Nothing earth shattering, but good, solid professional wrestling television: a decent mix of talk and action, a relatively compelling cast of characters, a focus on titles…well, on the World Title at least…effectively simple stories that followed internal pro wrestling logic. I was watching both Impact and Raw/Smackdown regularly at the time, and I often found myself enjoying Impact the most of the three, or at least Impact and Smackdown ahead of Raw.

Then the wheels slowly fell off. Among other things, Garrett Bischoff got his head-scratchingly nepotistic push, Hulk Hogan returned, storylines started to backpedal in convoluted ways, and it felt like Impact was returning to mediocre business as usual. Meanwhile, Wrestlemania season started in full force on the WWE side of things, making TNA seem less and less relevant in all ways possible.

Eventually, as the road to Wrestlemania XXVIII got closer to its destination, I stopped watching Impact all together, and soon I wasn’t even checking the results on pwtorch.com. But now, a few months removed from Wrestlemania, with WWE firmly back into its offseason slump mode and some TNA buzz following a reportedly decent Sacrifice PPV, I decided to check in on Impact after weeks away.

And my decision yielded a pleasant surprise. Last Thursday’s Impact Wrestling (5/17/12) was a thoroughly entertaining rasslin’ show.

After retaining the World Title at Sacrifice against Rob Van Dam, Bobby Roode–six months into his inaugural reign as champ–kicked off the show finding himself targeted by a mob of potential challengers. Hulk Hogan hit the stage in his current role as Impact GM (not a big fan of the Hulkster on my screen in 2012, but I can deal with him somewhat in this role), and announced a series of matches to determine four candidates for number one contendership, one of whom he would then select to have a title match with Roode the following week.

This is pretty basic, nothing exciting or earth shattering, but it works. Champ feuds with a contender up to a PPV, champ dispatches challenger, a rouge’s gallery of possible contenders crops up post-PPV, and a series of matches over the course of the night’s show determines the challenger for the next PPV. I like this because it makes it seem as if the undercard matters and that those wrestlers are actually working toward a goal (contendership for titles). It also helps create a sense that there’s some sort of ranking leading toward title shots. These are seemingly minor points, but they’re important fundamentals in allowing the viewer to suspend disbelief regarding wrestling’s predetermined nature.

I know there are some out there who feel this predetermination should be ironically celebrated or laughed at, but for me, a suspension of disbelief (and an internal logic that allows this suspension to take root), is–in addition to larger-than-life personalities and a history/tradition of viewing the sport–what makes wrestling worth watching.

We then saw Bully Ray defeat Rob Van Dam, AJ Styles defeat Austin Aries, Eric Young, ODB, Robbie E., Robbie T., Gunner, Garrett Bischoff, Magnus, and Devon in a battle royal, and Jeff Hardy defeat Mr. Anderson. All of these were qualifying matches for next week’s potential contendership.

Bully Ray is hands down the best heel in wrestling right now, so it’s nice to see him hovering around the title picture. RVD is pretty inconsequential to me these days, but I’d rather see RVD as an enhancement act than I would a Kofi Kingston or a Jack Swagger.

Which brings me to my point regarding the battle royal. While there are certainly the Robbie E.’s and Robbie T.’s on the TNA roster who I don’t give a crap about (though Robbie E. does a lot with what he’s been given gimmick wise), overall the TNA undercard is much more interesting to me than WWE.

In WWE, the drop off from CM Punk, Daniel Bryan, Cena, Lesnar, and co. to Epico, Primo, Kingston, R-Truth, et. al. is so staggering that aside from the main event angles, I don’t really feel like watching the rest of their shows. We’ll see if this changes as new faces are being introduced on Smackdown currently, but in the meantime, I’m more interested in TNA’s undercard mix of WWE veterans with stories and histories that make them seem better than generic placeholders (RVD, Devon, Mr. Anderson, Jeff Hardy, Kurt Angle), and younger and/or homegrown wrestlers who, while still often in enhancement roles, are at least occasionally presented as being hungry for or in the mix for titles (Gunner, Magnus, Austin Aries, AJ Styles, Kazarian, Christopher Daniels) rather than depicted simply as unranked, wheel-spinning “superstars.”

With the vets, even when they’re jobbing, you can get into them as grizzled old-timers, picking themselves up off the mat and trying to get back into the mix. The WWE vets can also, at any time, easily be slid into the main event. In the case of the younger and/or homegrown talent, you can empathize with their fight to get to the top, a top that’s often been denied to them in favor of undeserving but better connected talent. All of this gives what could be boring filler a sense that it’s part of a larger drama–the quest for titles and positioning. I’m not saying this never happens in WWE, but TNA’s current roster seems better suited at creating this illusion for me right now.

The battle royal was followed by a 3-way women’s match for the TNA Knockouts Title. While women’s wrestling in TNA is a step above WWE (which is automatically unwatchable), it’s still a shadow of its former self, so until something changes, this got fast forwarded.

Samoa Joe then faced Kurt Angle in another qualifying match. This was nothing special, but good. It’s always kind of sad to see Joe in the ring and then think about how he could have been used all these years. Angle is disturbing as hell regarding his health and apparent mental state, but the guy is a freaking machine.

And that was that. It was a little confusing, because the show never clearly stated how Hogan was going to pick one of the four potential candidates for contendership next week, but that being my biggest gripe with this episode is a good sign. We’ll see if Impact keeps it real again next week. I sure hope so.

I didn’t watch the 5/18/12 episode of WWE Smackdown, because it was leading into a PPV (Over the Limit) that I didn’t give a crap about.

I didn’t watch the 5/19/12 episode of Ring of Honor, because I hate watching their weeks that are out of sync with their iPPV schedule.

I didn’t watch the 5/21/12 episode of WWE Raw, because it was coming out of a PPV (Over the Limit) that I didn’t give a crap about, with nothing much seemingly on the horizon. Also, the news of Raw becoming a three hour show in the near future has kind of knocked the wind out of my sails regarding WWE. I love me some wrestling, but geeze louise!

I’ll probably check in with Smackdown this week to see how the likes of Damien Sandow and Claudio “Antonio Cesaro” Castagnoli are shaping up.

I’ll probably check in with Ring of Honor TV whenever their weird schedule catches up to the aftermath of the Border Wars iPPV.

I’ll probably check in with Raw next time there’s some Brock buzz or something else along those lines.

Speaking of which, more, shortly, on the last spate of iPPVs I watched: Evolve 12 and 13, and ROH: Border Wars. Better late than never!