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We’ve said it before: TNA is basically the 4th WWE brand behind Raw, Smackdown and ECW in that order. For all the talk of “This is Wrestling” and how they’re the “real alternative” to WWE, the reality is that there is no wrestling on the TV shows and there is nothing that they offer that you can’t get from WWE. WWE has the bigger stars. WWE has the better wrestlers. WWE has the superior skits. WWE absolutely has the better TV matches. WWE has the hotter girls. TNA USED to have the X-Division, but then they became the WWE Juniors Division. Something needs to change.
The sad thing is that this did not result in an immediate changing of the guard or major re-evaluation of the programming. There is an understanding that, yes, they need more wrestling on the shows. But, as usual, instead of looking at the real problems they are still looking at the next carrot to dangle, which in this case is TWO HOUR SHOWS~! Because, after all, one hour just isn’t enough.
My hope is that they get two hours preferably this week and fail quickly, so that, with no other options left (and what other options are there? They’ve got national TV on a strong network, they got a good prime time slot, they got big stars like Christian, Sting, Kurt Angle, etc., and they’ve got a money mark willing to lose millions; they have EVERYTHING they need to succeed), they can sit down and go, hey, maybe something ELSE is wrong; something like the fact that Impact is the shittiest TV show since the heyday of WCW Thunder.
There was a show in I believe November that may have been the worst wrestling TV show I’ve ever seen. When Vince Russo came in I said I’d give him a chance, but figured there was very little possibility that he was any different from the Vince Russo that helped kill WCW. Sure enough, Vince Russo hadn’t learned a goddamn thing since 1997, so basically we got 1997 in 2006, and what a disaster that turned out to be. We got outdated crash TV written by a guy who claims to be a great storyteller, who claims it’s all about the stories and all about the logic, and meanwhile his shitty storylines are such that none of them make any logical sense whatsoever and, unlike pretty much every great story dating back 3,000 years, instead of having a beginning, a middle and an end, we get an end without a beginning, or a beginning without an end, or a popular favorite, the middle without the beginning or the end, or a conclusion that in no way has anything to do with anything else previously in the story. He is, without question, the worst storyteller the world has ever known.
His “improved ratings” came about during a time where TNA also got an earlier time slot, meaning it was probably more the time slot than the writing. If anything, to be completely fair, he has kept the rating steady. Even this is not high praise since the rating had been staying steady since long before he returned to the company (he was around in the early days booking shit like the Dupp Cupp). The real problem is that TNA’s business model isn’t about the ratings, it’s about the money made on PPV. Well, it should be at least. Even if we LIE and claim that they were averaging 800,000 viewers per week when he came and are now averaging 1.6 million, or even 2 million (a figure they have never hit), what does that mean when PPV buyrates are actually LOWER now than when he came in? It means no one gives enough of a fuck about his stupid storylines to see them play out on pay-per-view, the operative term there being “PAY”.
TNA had been doing 25,000 buys on PPV pre-Russo. Russo came in and “booked” Joe vs. Angle I, which increased the number for that PPV to about 60,000 buys. I put “booked” in quotation marks because he really didn’t book anything, they just announced the match. The real booking started after that match when he proceeded to rush two more matches within the next month and a half, all on PPV, and fucked the storyline up to such a monumental degree (remember Angle breaking the ankle of Joe’s mystery girlfriend? If not, don’t worry, Joe and Angle don’t seem to remember either) that the next two shows were down in the 25,000 range again. Recent PPVs are dipping even below that, to around the 20,000 range. This is coming on the heels of doing 1.6 million viewers for a show two weeks ago (and, granted, that number was up because Nielsen is now logging ratings in college dorms). So out of 1.6 million viewers he’s convincing 20,000 of them to buy the PPVs, which is about 1.25% of the viewing audience. Out of every HUNDRED TNA viewers (and these are hardcore loyal viewers), ONE buys a PPV. I’m not certain, but that may be an all-time record low percentage in the history of televised professional wrestling. GO VINCE RUSSO.
I shed no tears for TNA as they spiral into oblivion with Captain McSwervyson at the helm. Anyone with a fucking brain knew this was coming, but Dixie Carter, God bless her, may actually be the Dixie Carter of Designing Women fame for all she’s learned in the past few years about the wrestling business. As mentioned before, nobody in a position of power got those numbers (either the head-to-head Thursday rating or the recent PPV figures) and axed the Vin Man. Instead, they thought, well, that Monday rating was pretty good all things considered!, and no! I wasn’t surprised by that Thursday number, I thought it held up pretty well! Meanwhile, guys are backstage miserable as all hell, the great positive word-of-mouth about the greatness of TNA is no longer being spread, guys are getting hurt and getting their pay docked to pay for the surgeries, the X-Division guys hate life so much that they openly mock it on TV, guys are banned from doing unapproved radio show interviews because they might say something negative about the company due to interviews two former WWE stars gave where they flat-out said that they’d go back to WWE if WWE snapped their fingers, and meanwhile the Forgiven One fiddles away and continues to book the same sort of television that was already out of style when Thunder was putting on the original-but-now-outdone stupidest television shows ever seen by man.
Hate this article? Love TNA? Well, guess what, you’re probably part of the problem. The LAST thing this company needs right now is folks talking about how everything is OK, and people like me are just so mean to rip them apart, and that it just TAKES TIME (how much time, five years, fifteen years, thirty years?), and that you have to LOSE MONEY TO MAKE MONEY (try SPEND money to make money, which is COMPLETELY different), how they’ve GOT TO GET TWO HOURS (they can’t even make one hour great, why the fuck would two hours be any different?), and how RUSSO HAS MADE EVERYONE A STAR (which shows a complete lack of understanding about what it means to be a star). This sort of blind fandom is the equivalent of having an alcoholic friend come up to you in a near-suicidal state telling you that they’ve got to get sober, and you joyously saying great!, let’s go discuss it over a few drinks!
(Quelle: Figure Four Weekly #609 - http://www.f4wonline.com)