AEW does not properly utilize its TV time

Prior to the premiere of AEW Collision back in June, the dirt sheets began swirling with rumors that not only would the Saturday show be the sole home of the returning CM Punk, but that Collision would feature a loose roster of its own.

There were immediate fears amid fans that AEW was about to poorly attempt a brand split the way that WWE had done in the past, with McMahon Land often starting strong but ultimately fizzling out creatively when it came to presenting their two separate shows as equal or even “separate.” However, as Collision took shape and quickly became the show where you’d get to see CM Punk, Bullet Club Gold, The House of Black, Andrade El Idolo, and Miro among others, the now-named “Colliders” had a lot of faces they could count on seeing each week on their red and yellow show.

Then, in August, Jack Perry got choked.

With AEW’s ousting of CM Punk came the immediate end of AEW’s soft brand split, with the previously banned Young Bucks closing the September 2, 2023 edition of Collision as soon as Pepsi Phil was out the door.

Now, two-and-a-half months isn’t the longest time in the world, but it was long enough to establish Collision’s patterns and tendencies. It was cool that the Elite were free to appear on both of AEW’s important shows (sorry Rampage) without fear of another fist fight breaking out, but would their newfound availability mean that we got less of Andrade’s weekly singles matches or the Bang Bang Gang’s fun with Cardblade?

In theory, no. As long as everyone who would have been on TV that week gets spread out accordingly, it should be fine. If the Young Bucks are going to be on Collision that week, maybe the Kings of the Black Throne should be on Dynamite. Keeping everyone who would have been on TV that week on TV seems easy enough, but in practice, it’s a little more nuanced.

Despite the pseudo-brand split ending, there are some main attractions who don’t move around much. The Young Bucks still haven’t wrestled on Collision, while Kenny Omega and Chris Jericho have done so twice and once, respectively. Likewise, Andrade and Miro are never on Dynamite, with Ricky Starks only appearing on the Wednesday show once since Punk left, and that was as Big Bill’s manager.

But for the rest of the roster members who either aren’t their show’s Featured Attraction or are otherwise “stragglers,” how evenly spread out is the remaining TV time?

The Week of Garcia, Velvet, and Hart

The November 8, 2023, edition of Dynamite opened with Daniel Garcia challenging MJF for Friedman’s AEW World Championship. Bell-to-bell, the match was about 11 minutes long, but with the cold open promo, the entrances, the whole segment lasted from 8 p.m. to 8:20 p.m. Not bad; in fact, it’s pretty standard for an AEW show’s opening segment to last the first 20 minutes.

After losing to the AEW Champion in 20 minutes on Dynamite, Garcia’s next move was to open that same week’s episode of Collision in another losing effort to Andrade, this segment lasting 22 minutes instead of 20.

So, between that week’s Dynamite and Collision, Garcia spent over 40 minutes telling us the same story twice: he’s pretty good at wrestling, but he’s not as good as he should be. Cool story, and potentially the start of a compelling character arc, but definitely something that could have happened on separate weeks.

That same week, Julia Hart defeated a returning Red Velvet on Dynamite. Then, Red Velvet beat Ruby Soho on Rampage. Finally, Julia Hart beat Willow Nightingale to round out AEW’s three weekly women’s matches on Collision. And, while I’m at it, the next AEW women’s match on TV that following Dynamite also saw Red Velvet lose to a spooky woman in Sky Blue, followed by an appearance by Julia Hart.

I’ll give bonus points because the Rampage match was more about furthering Ruby Soho’s storyline with Angelo Parker of 2point0, but the fact that the next three women’s matches AEW had after Hart vs Velvet featured one of the two women made me feel like I was taking crazy pills. Are you really telling me that, with a roster as deep as AEW’s, you have to show me three Red Velvet matches in eight days? I like Red Velvet — just like I really like Daniel Garcia — but the good vibes I felt upon seeing her return from injury were immediately hampered by her overexposure.

And the reason I led into all of this by talking about CM Punk’s firing from AEW is that, upon watching Garcia, Velvet, and Hart wrestling on my TV way too much in one short period, I immediately thought back to the short-lived brand split and wondered if All In: London really was the beginning of this concerning booking pattern.

The AEW Brand Split: Punk-Filled

To address a personal elephant in the room, I must note that, as far as Darby Allin was concerned, there never was a brand split. He simply had enemies on Wednesdays (namely Swerve Strickland and the Mogul Embassy) and enemies on Saturdays (namely Christian Cage and Luchasaurus). Even while Darby feuded with two separate evil groups, though, the two sides still didn’t come together for all those months of Collision until right before All In, when Christian Cage replaced AR Fox in what was supposed to be the blow-off of Darby’s feud with Swerve and Friends.

For two-and-a-half months, there were Colliders, and there were unnamed Dynamite wrestlers (though I’ve always been partial to Kaboomers). The TNT Champion was on TNT’s Collision; the International Champion was on TBS’s Dynamite. The TBS Champion was… also on TNT, while the Women’s Champion was mostly confined to TBS save for the premiere of Collision. Even within the Outcasts, Toni Storm was still the lone member of the trio who appeared on Collision regularly, getting backstage segments where she could shine and start piecing together her “Timeless” character before leaving the Outcasts full-stop.

MJF, as champion of all of AEW, probably appeared on both shows the most outside of Darby, but besides that pair, few people appeared on both weekly shows to cut promos, and no one but the Gunns wrestled on both. Punk showing up on Dynamite to call out Bullet Club Gold days after Punk’s return to Collision was treated as a shocking event, as was FTR’s reappearance on Dynamite after MJF and Adam Cole won their tag tournament, and that’s because it was clear who were Colliders — the specific shortlist of wrestlers who were there every Saturday — and who was literally anyone else.

As mentioned in passing, though, the Gunns did wrestle all week, taking on not only the Hardys but also the Young Bucks in the weeks after Collision started and carrying the Bang Bang Gang’s non-Collision rivalries, while fellow Gangsters Juice and Jay only wrestled on Saturdays. I mean, with four members of their stable, it only made sense that the group would split up their time across two shows, unless they wanted to solely wrestle in multi-man main event matches with CMFTR for the rest of the year.

So, it was clear that if a group got too big—a la Toni Storm sans Saraya and Ruby Soho or Bullet Club Gold as a whole—there would come a point where you’d need more TV time to explore the depths of the act.

However, once there was no longer a straight-edge wall standing in the way of the two shows, well, colliding, this inkling of an idea was taken to its logical extreme.

The AEW Brand Split: Post-Punk

After All Out, Jay White appeared on Dynamite and told MJF that he was setting his sights on the AEW Champion now that Max was done with Adam Cole. After months away, the Switchblade was back on Dynamite. That is, until Saturday, where Jay was scheduled to take part in an eight-man tag before missing the show for personal reasons.

Even down Jay for the night, Bullet Club Gold’s presence was still felt on both shows, and it would be for the foreseeable future. Typically, Jay would cut a promo on Wednesday, then wrestle on Saturday, followed by either a tag match from the Gunns or a trios match with the Gunns and Juice Robinson. If we were lucky, Juice would get a singles match on either show, too. Whatever the case may be, BCG could not be contained to one TV show a week.

The thing is, it wasn’t just them. A week before Jay’s triumphant Dynamite return, Dynamite and Collision both featured women’s trios matches where the babyface team was comprised of Hikaru Shida, Kris Statlander, and Britt Baker. The week of Jay’s return, the Grand Slam Eliminator Tournament began, meaning we saw four competitors from that week’s Dynamite and Rampage wrestle each other again on Collision. AND both Moxley and Statlander appeared on both shows, defending their titles in good but ultimately pointless matches, story-wise.

Collision immediately became early 2010s SmackDown in the wake of Punk and Perry’s fight at All In — in other words, an unnecessary, repetitive watch. The Aussie Open squash match? Just happened last night on Rampage. The Acclaimed defending their trios titles? How about they do it not only on both TV shows, but also on pay-per-view that same week and against three teams that have no shot at winning? The Acclaimed are great characters, but I do not need to see them wrestle three times in seven days (or, really, four times in nine days since they were on Rampage the week prior).

This type of overexposure is especially troubling in the women’s division with what little time the division gets on TV each week. Kris Statlander was cooking in mid-September when she defended the TBS Championship on back-to-back nights against Jade Cargill and Britt Baker. Seriously, both matches were great. I just don’t think two-thirds of the week’s women’s wrestling content should be Kris Statlander matches. Plus, Baker was also in that week’s Dynamite match (losing, even), meaning not only was she in two-thirds of the week’s women’s matches, but her booking also didn’t make sense on a this-is-a-real sport level.

There are over 30 women on the AEW women’s roster according to their website, and while that does include injured wrestlers (e.g., Jamie Hayter and Thunder Rosa) and one Paige VanZant, there are other wrestlers like Taya Valkyrie, Diamante, and the ROH-stuck folks like Athena, Mercedes Martinez, and Leyla Hirsch who would kill it if they were given just one of those two 10-minute matches.

Seriously, I know she got brought up a lot earlier, but Julia Hart genuinely wrestled on Rampage: Grand Slam, Collision the next night, the next Dynamite, and that week’s Collision. Then, the next Dynamite and Collision both had Toni Storm matches. I think both of those women are doing phenomenal right now, just like Kris was during her TBS Title defenses, but this is egregious.

How to Fix the Problem

Simply put, AEW needs to ensure that the people they need to wrestle on Wednesday aren’t wrestling on Saturday, and vice versa. If you NEED Daniel Garcia to lose to both MJF and Andrade to further all three of their stories, maybe you can split that across two weeks and have Andrade beat up Darius Martin in the meantime? If you ALREADY had Claudio Castagnoli pin Orange Cassidy in a tag match on Dynamite and are having him cut a promo about how mad he is about Bryan Danielson’s injury, maybe he doesn’t need a squash match on Collision?

In theory, the upcoming few weeks of the Continental Classic already fix this problem by ensuring that there are six wrestlers per show who are wrestling on exclusively Dynamite or Collision until the end of December, but even then, it’s hard to say that AEW has figured out their TV usage problem when they had to use a livestream to announce 8 of the 12 tournament competitors THE DAY THE TOURNAMENT BEGAN.

I’ve never run a wrestling promotion, and I’ve never had to keep track of the star power, health statuses, and personal lives of wrestlers to ensure that my vision comes to fruition. One thing I can say for certain, though, is that the AEW roster is far too deep for me to be seeing the same people wrestling over and over again within the same week.

I have no problem with a promo on one show and a match on the other. I typically have no problem with a match on Rampage and a match on another show unless it’s the same thing twice (*cough* Aussie Open *cough*). I don’t even have a problem with two long-winded promos in the same week when they’re about different things (e.g. Jay White stealing MJF’s belt on Dynamite, then challenging Hangman Page on Collision).

All of those feel like proper uses of time, as they build upon each other. But if you look at the week ahead and see that you have Daniel Garcia or Willow Nightingale or anyone of that ilk losing twice in a week for basically no reason, maybe reach into that expansive roster of yours and utilize the waves of amazing talent under contract with AEW. It seems that Tony Khan has forgotten that AEW stands for ALL Elite Wrestling. If the whole roster truly is elite, maybe he should use them.