BRM Reviews the 3/23/2022 Dynamite (some great wrestling, but the stories are bad)

[Big Red Machine]

DAX HARWOOD vs. CM PUNK- 8/10
Cash came out with Dash, but headed to the back. I love how a switch was magically flipped in FTR’s heads, and now they’re just full-on babyfaces. The reason for their split with Tully was that they wanted to concentrate on “family” (and also revenge) while he wanted them to try to win back the tag titles. How does the desire to concentrate on “family” translate to “we will no longer cheat in professional fights?”
Oh yeah. FTR have the AAA tag titles. That makes Tully’s insistence that they “focus on championships” even sillier, as they already have one. Obviously more is better, but it’s hard to claim that FTR are “losing focus” when they’re the tag champs of a major world promotion.
Jim Ross told us that CM Punk has twenty-three years of experience… so I guess Jim somehow forgot about Punk’s big SEVEN-YEAR LAYOFF.
Gunn Club were in the crowd, doing Gunn Club things. They distracted Dax at one point.
Dax worked over Punk’s back. They had a very exciting match. It was a great example of how you can have an exciting “modern” style match without going too fast or having a million nearfalls , flips, superkicks, or head-drops.
Cash Wheeler came out to ringside after a big bump to the floor to cheer Dax on. Tony Schiavone made a point of drawing our attention to the fact that Cash was only cheering his partner on and not trying to do anything to hurt or distract Punk.

POST-MATCH STUFF- fine
Gunn Club taunted FTR on their way to the back, so I guess we’re building to that.
CM Punk made the “title belt” gesture. Excalibur said that we had no idea whether he meant the world title, the TNT title, or the tag titles. I’m going to go out on a limb and say he meant the world title because that’s the only one he’s ever mentioned before, and that wasn’t much more than a month ago.

Are you kidding me? They’ve got CM Punk in singles action against Dax Harwood, an eight-man tornado tag including the Hardys, Darby Allin, and Sting, Adam Cole vs. Jay Lethal, a grudge match between Red Velvet and Leyla Hirsch… and the match AEW choose to put in the main event spot is Jericho and Daniel Garcia against the f*cking BEAVER BOYS.
Apparently they are somehow the top-ranked tag team in AEW. In fact, the top five teams are them, Gunn Club, Top Flight, The Acclaimed, and FTR. I can’t recall the last time I saw ANY of those five teams win a match. Meanwhile, Darby Allin & Sting are undefeated, and somehow unranked. Top Flight, meanwhile, have made it to #3 with three victories over jobber teams.
The last time Silver and Reynolds won a match on TV was THE END OF SEPTEMBER, and that was a SIX-TEEN PERSON TAG. The last time they won on TV as a pair was… NEVER.
To hype this match up, they showed what they claimed was a young John Solver at a photo-op with Jericho, but it looked like they cut the images out of two separate photos. There wasn’t even a photo background. It was just the AEW hype-screen background. If I had to guess, there were WWE logos in the background, but I can’t imagine that blurring the background (or even just blurring the WWE logos) wouldn’t have been enough to legally cover them. They way they did this made the whole thing feel phony.
(It’s possible that Chris Benoit was also in the picture, but in that case, just blur him out. It would have been better to not show any picture at all than to show this.)

JERICHO APPRECIATION SOCIETY PROMO- bad
Jericho wasn’t terrible, but wasn’t particularly effective, either. Garcia leaned into this “pro wrestling vs. sports entertainment” crap. The idea that, between the two of them, Garcia is the “sports entertainer” and Silver is the “pro wrestler” is utterly ridiculous.
They bragged about putting LAX and Kingston out of AEW, claiming they would never come back. 2.0 were clowns during this.

TORNADO TAG TEAM MATCH: The Hardys, Darby Allin, & Sting vs. AFO (Private Party, The Butcher, & The Blade)- 7/10
Being cheating heels, The Bunny, Andrade el Idolo, and Jose the Assistant… decided NOT to be at ringside for this chaotic match where opportunities to cheat would be plentiful.
As Darby and The Butcher brawled through the crowd, Tony Schiavone informed us that The Butcher has a grudge against Darby because he suffered a thumb injury in a match against Darby Allin which put him out for five months. I thought this was stupid, simply because he has been back for over a month, including having a match against Darby himself and it hadn’t been brought up, and before that his stable being involved in several matches against Darby, including a no DQs match, and The Butcher didn’t interfere at all… but it’s turns out it’s worse. You see… the injury in question wasn’t the time off that the Butcher recently returned to action from. It was an injury in APRIL OF LAST YEAR, which he came back from SIX MONTHS AGO, and apparently has held this “grudge” against Darby… but didn’t in any way try to go after him because of it.
If Schiavone brought this up on his own, I hope someone told him to knock it off. If this is something he was told to bring up, then that once again tells us all we need to know about AEW’s approach to storylines: If it seems like it makes things more heated, we’ll say it, no matter how much the evidence might contradict it.
Anyway, Andrade just happened to have gone to the section of seats that the Butcher and Darby brawled towards, so he interfered. The Butcher threw Darby down a flight of stairs. Darby is insane.
Both Matt Hardy and Private Party join the ranks of dumbasses like Orange Cassidy and Sammy Guevara, who would rather grab someone and jump off of a high place than just push or throw the opponent off of said high place.
People brawled onto the concourse. Jeff did a big dive.
Sting managed to get from the concourse to the ring SHOCKINGLY quickly (I suppose it’s possible they shot the part with Jeff’s dive beforehand, in front of a group of plants, but I don’t think so; if they did, then good for them for fooling me).
Speaking of fooling people, everyone BE HONEST: When Sting came off the turnbuckle for that Gin & Juice, you’re immediately reaction was “oh my G-d he botched that so badly,” wasn’t it. Props to those three for coming up with what they did there.
This was a big, crazy brawl that, while entertaining, felt meaningless. Private Party got pinned again, this time with both of them getting pinned (one by Matt, the other by Sting). That second pin was so unnecessary that it makes me wonder if they’re leaving, and Tony Khan is just jobbing them out on the way.

TONY SCHIAVONE INTERVIEWS FTR- meh
They’re full babyfaces now, as “if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a spoiled brat” and the Gunn Club are apparently spoiled brats. Dax said this while stilling being part of a stable led by MJF. Dax wants Gunn Club vs. FTR on Dynamite next week.

BRYAN DANIELSON & JON MOXLEY vs. THE VARSITY BLONDS (w/Julia Hart)- 4.25/10
The Varsity Blonds are apparently 23-6 in their last 29 matches. Wasn’t the story with them that things were supposedly “falling apart” after Malakai Black blew mist into the eyes of Julia Hart (for reasons that remain unexplained now, three and a half months later)?
They showed is Julia, still with her eyepatch, sulking against the ringpost, not even watching the match. That sure would have worked a lot better if the graphic they showed for this match during the opener didn’t have Julia being all peppy and cheery with the eyepatch on.
Regal was on commentary once again. Dragon and Moxley dominated the match and won cleanly.

POST-MATCH SEGMENT- meh
Regal came to the ring, and Moxley cut a promo which had good words and delivery, but he didn’t actually say much of anything.

MJF PROMO- mostly great
The pattern of Shawn Spears’ chair matches MJF’s scarf. Or maybe it’s the other way around. I don’t know which one had it first.
He has private security facing the ramp. He says he will have another match with CM Punk at some point, in which he will embarrass Punk. He also says that he will attend Punks’ funeral and piss on his grave.
At one point the fans randomly started chanting “JESUS!” MJF responded to this by saying that he would strap Wardlow to a cross, just like Jesus. MJF said he would kick Wardlow’s “skank mother” of out of the house Wardlow bought for her. How can he do that if Wardlow bought the house?
Wardlow came out… and got f*cking held back by security at a wrestling show. He was struggling against MJF’s four security guards, and then was immobilized when reinforcements from the AEW crew came out. MJF said that because Wardlow works for him, not AEW, then he can say he doesn’t want Wardlow at the shows and thus Wardlow will have to stay home. That makes sense… but if Wardlow’s goal has been to make money to pay for his mother’s medical bills and give her a home or whatever, then why does he care if he is wrestling or not? I can buy that MJF would spin the “you’ll be a nobody” as him getting some sort of revenge on Wardlow because he knows he can’t beat Wardlow in a fair fight, but I don’t see why Wardlow would be so opposed to this.
Anyway, MJF’s delivery was, as always, amazing, and calling Wardlow a “greedy little pig” and then always referring to him as “pig” was tremendous, but the storyline just doesn’t work for me because they never established Wardlow as having 1) any integrity (other than at completely forced times) and 2) they never gave us the sese that Wardlow cared much about a wrestling career for the sake of competing. He was always happy to be MJF’s bodyguard, which we then learned was because all he really wanted was to make money to help his mother.
After Wardlow was ordered away, MJF insisted that the Pinnacle was still a thing, and said that they would be moving up.

TONY SCHIAVONE INTERVIEWS THE GOOF TROOP- decent
Trent is upset that Wheeler YUTA wants to go train with Regal, Dragon, and Moxley. Trent thinks that YUTA owes Chuck Taylor and Orange Cassidy for training him (which they really didn’t, and we never aw anything resembling mentorship), bringing him into AEW (I guess that’s kayfabe true), and letting him sleep on their couch. He had to sleep on their couch? Really? I guess Tony Khan doesn’t pay very much.
Trent says he is done with YUTA. YUTA says he loves the other two, but never cared for Trent. He says that he isn’t trying to be the best friend he can be; he’s trying to be the best wrestler he can be, and Trent clearly doesn’t understand that.
The performances were good, but I thought the role Trent was put him resulted in him coming off like an overdramatic douche, especially because neither of the men he was supposedly upset on behalf of seemed upset at all (and don’t tell me “Orange Cassidy’s gimmick that he doesn’t care.” If he doesn’t care, why should we?).

ADAM COLE vs. JAY LETHAL- 7/10
I was absolutely shocked that Lethal got such a great babyface reaction especially considering that he was wrestling Adam Cole.
reDRagon came out and distracted Lethal. You’d think that after doing this, maybe security would have come out and removed them from ringside, considering their propensity to interfere, but apparently not. If you’re going to have the promotion preemptively ban Statlander from ringside when all she has done is prevent Leyla from cheating, you’d think they would care enough to try to prevent cheating here, too, but apparently not. (I know what you’re thinking. There will be more on this below, after the post-match segment to Red Velvet vs. Hirsch).
And there’s the cheating. Lethal had Cole pinned, but reDRagon distracted the referee and allowed Cole to hit a low blow. Cole then hit the BOOM for the win.

POST-MATCH SEGMENT- meh
Adam Cole cuts a promo on Adam Page, saying he will take the title, etc. If you’re building Cole towards a title shot, why couldn’t you let him beat Lethal cleanly?
Page comes out, because his cowboy sense of honor apparently requires him to walk into a three-on-one situation. He took his leather belt off and attacked the heels with it until he got overwhelmed. If Page is willing to use a weapon in this situation (and I agree that he should), why use your leather belt instead of the big, heavy gold one that you threw aside while getting into the ring, which we know can knock people out? What an idiot.
Luchasarus, Christian Cage, and Jungle Boy came out to make the save, so either the Dark Order are just bad friends because of poor booking, or they’ve begun to turn on Page for stupid, petty reasons. Adam Cole left with the AEW World Heavyweight Title.

DUSTIN RHODES VS. LANCE ARCHER VIDEO PACKAGE- This would have been really good if it didn’t feel like it coming completely out of nowhere. I had even forgotten that Lambert had been managing Lance Archer.

TONY SCHIAVONE INTERVIEWS SAMMY GUEVARA & TAY CONTI- bad
Sammy says that all he cared about in the past was impressing the fans, but now he wants revenge. Okay… so last month when you quite the Inner Circle because you were worried that their in-fighting would hurt your career, you didn’t mean that it would cause you to lose matches, but rather that it would make it harder for you to impress the crowd with your flips and bumps?
Tay cut a promo on PVZ, in which she broke the first rule of promos by telling us that PVZ really isn’t so tough because she got beaten up her entire MMA career.
Sammy demands that “any two” of Lambert’s crew come out to fight them right now. Lambert and the Men of the Year came out onto the stage. Lambert listed the members of his crew… but forgot Lance Archer, who we just saw him speak as the manager of in a video package. Oops.
He explained that PVZ wasn’t here “because her contract excludes her from personal appearances in sh*t-stain towns like Austin, Texas.”
Lambert refused to give them the match, and he kissed the title belt, allowing Sammy to get in the punchline that “we’ve been living rent-free in your head since we got here, but if you only knew what Tay and I did while wearing that belt, then you’d know we live in your mouth, too.” Yeah, it’s gross, but is it really a babyface thing to do to get your bodily fluids on something someone else will have to wear at one point? Hell, I wouldn’t get bodily fluids on a thing that I have to wear again without washing it first.

RICKY STARKS VS. SHANE STRICKLAND VIDEO PACKAGE- good
They face off on Rampage.

KRIS STATLANDER IS BARRED FROM RINGSIDE: Red Velvet vs. Leyla Hirsch- 4.5/10
Yes, jumping someone before the bell is wrong, but if you come out for a grudge match against someone who has already attacked you from behind once, and you start doing your f*cking entrance dance on the apron and turn your back to your opponent, and the opponent kicks you off the apron, you’re a f*cking idiot.
Leyla managed to cheat to win because she had a turnbuckle piece hidden in her trunks. Um… how about you check her for weapon when she comes to the ring, like you’re supposed to. Hell, if you check the one competitor during the other’s entrance, that might reduce the number f times someone jumps someone during an entrance.
Also, Leyla is going to hide a weapon in her trunks, why would she hide something big and bulky like that instead of something like brass knuckles? Yes, motifs can enhance stories, but they don’t enhance the story in a situation where their presence defies logic!

POST-MATCH SEGMENT- forced and dumb
Not satisfied with her victory, Leyla started to attack the helpless Red Velvet, setting up for Statlander to run out and make the save. If Leyla wanted to keep beating on Red Velvet, why did she pin her at all? Even if Statlander hadn’t come out, Leyla has to know that security would have come out to try to pull her off, but that wouldn’t happen (and Statlander wouldn’t be able to come out) if the match were still going on.
This was another one of those segments where it feels like the character’s decisions were all made to wind up at the place where the booker wanted the segment to wind up, rather than the decisions feeling organic and logical (and still winding up where the booker wants the segment to go). Tony Khan’s goals for this segment were very clearly 1) Leyla cheats to win, but 2) Statlander stands tall at the end. If Leyla needs to cheat to win then we can’t have Statlander able to come out and stop it like she did last time, so Statlander is arbitrarily barred from ringside (more on this in a minute), but we also need a reason for Statlander to come out where it doesn’t feel like she is picking a fight with someone who has already wrestled, so we’ll have Leyla attack Red Velvet after the match, too (even though if she wanted to keep beating on Red Velvet, it would have made more sense to not pin her and just start stomping her head in).
Okay, on the arbitrary nature of who is barred from ringside and who isn’t:
I am not going to dispute the fact that barring people from ringside (or other related things, like when to go to a cage as opposed to a ringside enforcer, or whatever) has been extremely arbitrary over the course of pro wrestling history. But just because the idea is already baked into the pie doesn’t mean that the arbitrary nature of such decisions can’t hurt the show when those decisions are being made in ways that feel completely foolish (like barring people from ringside on an entire episode of Rampage, no matter if there is a history of interference or not, but then not barring Britt Baker’s crew from ringside for her PPV title defense a few days later).
The reason the term “suspension of disbelief” uses the metaphor that it does is because of the inherent warning that too much pressure on it, and it will collapse. Because of that, it is best to use whatever storyline tools are available to reduce the arbitrary feeling of such decisions when you can. This is a step that AEW very often misses.
Look at tonight’s show for an excellent example of this. The kayfabe goal of a wrestling promotion is to make money by selling tickets and PPVS to fans of sporting contests that are fair competition to determine which wrestler or team is the best in each division. (A grudge feud can only exist because of the legal loopholes that pro wrestling seems to provide. Hockey has grudge matches, but no one is cutting the other team with their skate blades.) On tonight’s show Kris Statlander was barred from ringside by AEW management for interfering in a previous match, when her interference was done to (and accomplished the goal of) preventing someone from cheating. Meanwhile, reDRagon, who have a history of cheating in AEW, were not only not barred from ringside preemptively, but no effort was made to remove them from ringside after they came out and distracted one of the competitors, causing the tide to turn in a match.
I probably wouldn’t have even looked at reDRagon’s presence funny if it hadn’t been for Statlander being barred from ringside in a later match. The juxtaposition is that invites that question “why is she barred from bring but they aren’t?” The booker’s job is to answer that question, and Tony Khan didn’t, which is frustrating, because the following scenario took me about ten seconds to think up:
Leyla Hirsch, being a heel, demanded that Statlander be barred from ringside during their match, claiming (technically correctly) that she interfered in their previous match. Management didn’t like this, but Red Velvet said she was fine with it (because she’s a fearless babyface who wants to get her hands on the heel she hates), so AEW management agreed to the stipulation. That’s all you needed. A few sentences from the commentators that could have been done during Hirsch’s entrance, and the problem would be solved. Instead, we got something that makes the promotion look stupid.

TONY SCHIAVONE INTERVIEWS JADE CARGILL AND MARK STERLING- fine
Jade is already planning the celebration for after her thirtieth win. She tells Sterling that they will need green confetti and green Lamborghinis and so forth. That’s good timing, as that stuff will probably be on sale now that St. Patrick’s Day has passed.

TONY SCHIAVONE’S INTERVIEW WITH THUNDER ROSA IS INTERRUPTED BY VICKIE GUERRERO- meh
Vickie told Thunder Rosa to swim back to Mexico. This was a distraction so that Nyla Rose could attack Thunder Rosa from behind. (I mean that the statement was a distraction, not that Thunder Rosa actually followed Vickie’s instructions and Nyla was waiting halfway across the Rio Grande and attacked Thunder Rosa there). Nyla posed with the belt, and Vickie told us that Nyla was a real champion. How much do you want to bet that if I go check the rankings, Nyla Rose is going to be ranked extremely highly, despite not having been seen on TV in a long time?
Yup. We haven’t seen Nyla on TV for a month and a half, but suddenly she’s ranked #2. Even funnier, she wasn’t even ranked last week. But apparently you can make that big jump simply by beating Robyn Renegade, a wrestler so prolific that she doesn’t even have a Cagematch.net profile.


JERICHO APPRECIATION SOCIETY (Chris Jericho & Daniel Garcia) (w/2.0) vs. THE DARK ORDER (Alex Reynolds & John Silver) (w/Five and Ten)- 5.5/10
This was not a main event-quality match at all.
The JAS won after baseball bat shot to Reynolds’ back and Garcia using a Sharpshooter… so our new big heel stable can’t even beat a pair of clowns cleanly.


Another mixed bag episode of Dynamite. There was some very good wrestling, but the Creative direction is mostly bad, and way too many details fall through the cracks.

[Thelone]

Are you kidding me? They’ve got CM Punk in singles action against Dax Harwood, an eight-man tornado tag including the Hardys, Darby Allin, and Sting, Adam Cole vs. Jay Lethal, a grudge match between Red Velvet and Leyla Hirsch… and the match AEW choose to put in the main event spot is Jericho and Daniel Garcia against the f*cking BEAVER BOYS.

They're doing that a lot : putting the big matches first, supposedly to start hot (and finish ice cold with jobber matches, but shhh).

JERICHO APPRECIATION SOCIETY PROMO- bad
Jericho wasn’t terrible, but wasn’t particularly effective, either. Garcia leaned into this “pro wrestling vs. sports entertainment” crap. The idea that, between the two of them, Garcia is the “sports entertainer” and Silver is the “pro wrestler” is utterly ridiculous.
They bragged about putting LAX and Kingston out of AEW, claiming they would never come back. 2.0 were clowns during this.

Is "sports entertainer" used that much by WWE themselves? Sports entertainment sure, superstars for the actual performers, but sports entertainer really seems like a term used mostly by WWE haters and very rarely by the EVIL FED.

When Sting came off the turnbuckle for that Gin & Juice, you’re immediately reaction was “oh my G-d he botched that so badly,” wasn’t it. Props to those three for coming up with what they did there.

Shame the cameraman stayed on Sting while he was trying to salvage this mess despite Hardy, who I guess still has some functioning brain cells, brawling with the other Party guy away from them.

BRYAN DANIELSON & JON MOXLEY vs. THE VARSITY BLONDS (w/Julia Hart)- 4.25/10
The Varsity Blonds are apparently 23-6 in their last 29 matches. Wasn’t the story with them that things were supposedly “falling apart” after Malakai Black blew mist into the eyes of Julia Hart (for reasons that remain unexplained now, three and a half months later)?
They showed is Julia, still with her eyepatch, sulking against the ringpost, not even watching the match. That sure would have worked a lot better if the graphic they showed for this match during the opener didn’t have Julia being all peppy and cheery with the eyepatch on.

Man, this storyline with Martelange Black and his spoopy group sure is... going somewhere. Can't wait to see him call himself the "devourer of planets" and mention his nebulous Cousin Allison.

Also love the awful MS Paint work they've done with Hart's graphic.

MJF PROMO- mostly great

This week : the debut of masked canadian sensation Ouardeleau!!!

ADAM COLE vs. JAY LETHAL- 7/10
I was absolutely shocked that Lethal got such a great babyface reaction especially considering that he was wrestling Adam Cole.

Why? Cole is exposed every week as a skinny teenager cosplaying as a pro wrestler on national TV who's been doing the same fucking thing for the last six years (EIGHT if you're counting the Kingdom), while Lethal is a TV jobber who has done nothing of note so far except farm wins on Dark and Elevator (and that's coming from a guy who's never been too high on him).

TONY SCHIAVONE INTERVIEWS SAMMY GUEVARA & TAY CONTI- bad

Another finger-on-the-pulse booking idea from two-time booker of the year here (like selling ringtones and phone wallpapers in the year 2022).

Remember when Tongue Man proposed to his then-long time girlfriend on some random episode of Dynamite like six months ago? I think it took barely a couple of months for people to notice that TM and Shibatay were awfully close on his shitty vlogs and wonder if there was more behind it while the now-fiancée was phased out. Then ****Face announced that he broke up with her sometime in december I believe, both him and Conti trended on Twitter soon after and she """quit""" for five seconds because she has a really thin skin Twitter trolls while Samuel flailed around about "respecting our privacy" (which became a running gag nowadays, because they've always been placating it all over sOcIaL mEdIa), then they finally came out at the end of the year which was... not well received to put it lightly, mostly because they're horrendously obnoxious and immature about it (think young teenagers in their first relationship). Basically, everyone and their dog think that The Tongue is some vain clown who dumped his girlfriend who followed him everywhere during his indy days for a hot piece of ass the second he could, and Conti as a homewrecker pretty much.

In Tony Khan's mind, this giant mess is THE PERFECT BABYFACE COUPLE!!!

TONY SCHIAVONE’S INTERVIEW WITH THUNDER ROSA IS INTERRUPTED BY VICKIE GUERRERO- meh

Rose is pretty much Kane at this point : always the first opponent to a new champion no matter what she's been doing lately (like farming wins on Dark and Elevator, ok I'll stop now).

[Big Red Machine]

Are you kidding me? They’ve got CM Punk in singles action against Dax Harwood, an eight-man tornado tag including the Hardys, Darby Allin, and Sting, Adam Cole vs. Jay Lethal, a grudge match between Red Velvet and Leyla Hirsch… and the match AEW choose to put in the main event spot is Jericho and Daniel Garcia against the f*cking BEAVER BOYS.

They're doing that a lot : putting the big matches first, supposedly to start hot (and finish ice cold with jobber matches, but shhh).

I didn't see Punk vs. Harwood as a big enough match to main event the show, either (though the names were big enough that it was a fine choice to open the show). But it was certainly bigger than what they actually main evented with.
I suppose there is an argument that you will occasionally have to do this sort of thing if you're trying to educate fans that Jericho's crew are a main event-level act, but even if that was the idea:
1. It's ideal to maneuver that act into the main event spot by having a different main event advertised and then through some angle either being forced to put it off (which I'm fine with occasionally on a weekly TV show), or more ideally creating a reason for that match to go on earlier than expected, leaving the thing that will be remembered as the main event open for this new thing you want in there.
2. I still think you need a bigger-name opponent that the Beaver Boys, but especially...
3. If your goal is to educate fans that an act that doesn't feel like a main event-level act really is at that level, then it is imperative that when you give them the chance to be in the main event, the match has to deliver at a main event level. This didn't even come close, and really wasn't even given the time to possibly have a chance.

JERICHO APPRECIATION SOCIETY PROMO- bad
Jericho wasn’t terrible, but wasn’t particularly effective, either. Garcia leaned into this “pro wrestling vs. sports entertainment” crap. The idea that, between the two of them, Garcia is the “sports entertainer” and Silver is the “pro wrestler” is utterly ridiculous.
They bragged about putting LAX and Kingston out of AEW, claiming they would never come back. 2.0 were clowns during this.

Is "sports entertainer" used that much by WWE themselves? Sports entertainment sure, superstars for the actual performers, but sports entertainer really seems like a term used mostly by WWE haters and very rarely by the EVIL FED.

You're not wrong about this, but the message is clear either way, and it's actually possible that saying "superstar" wouldn't work as well because declaring his guys to be "SUPERSTARS!" is exactly what Jericho would do in any gimmick.

MJF PROMO- mostly great

This week : the debut of masked canadian sensation Ouardeleau!!!

Ironically, I thought using French to come up with something that sounds the same was clever enough that I popped for it.
AEW shouldn't do it, obviously because the idea is stupid, but your specifics here were actually quite clever that if this were, say, CHIKARA, I would enjoy the idea.

ADAM COLE vs. JAY LETHAL- 7/10
I was absolutely shocked that Lethal got such a great babyface reaction especially considering that he was wrestling Adam Cole.

Why? Cole is exposed every week as a skinny teenager cosplaying as a pro wrestler on national TV who's been doing the same fucking thing for the last six years (EIGHT if you're counting the Kingdom), while Lethal is a TV jobber who has done nothing of note so far except farm wins on Dark and Elevator (and that's coming from a guy who's never been too high on him).

I completely disagree with your take on Cole here. He's short, yes but he doesn't feel like a "skinny teenager cosplaying as a pro wrestler" at all. He comes off as serious and intense, and like someone who believes every single word he says.
As for the "doing the same thing for eight years" accusation, it never really hurt Flair, did it (and after a point, babyface Flair and heel Flair were pretty much the same thing). Jinny hasn't been going for quite that long (she's only at about six or seven), but she has been the same character for a long time and has been great, and I see no reason for her to ever change.
If you have a character who feels like a real person, then the booker can simply put that person in new(ish) situations and give them new challenges, and that's all you need. Doing the same thing for too long only becomes an issue when you rely on shtick rather than feeling like a real person (Hogan, Young Bucks, Ishii, Naito, Bray Wyatt, Penta, Orange Cassidy, Best Friends).
I suppose it can be an issue when you have too many people doing the same thing for too long, but I don't think that's a problem in AEW right now.

That being said, I do think that the moment when Delirious' booking started to go sharply downhill and never really recovered was putting Cole and the Kingdom back together after their (revealed to be fake) break-up in 2015, but the issue there wasn't Cole doing the same thing he had been doing so much as it was reverting to a status quo that they seemed to have been moving away from, and with a lame excuse.

TONY SCHIAVONE INTERVIEWS SAMMY GUEVARA & TAY CONTI- bad

Another finger-on-the-pulse booking idea from two-time booker of the year here (like selling ringtones and phone wallpapers in the year 2022).

Remember when Tongue Man proposed to his then-long time girlfriend on some random episode of Dynamite like six months ago? I think it took barely a couple of months for people to notice that TM and Shibatay were awfully close on his shitty vlogs and wonder if there was more behind it while the now-fiancée was phased out. Then ****Face announced that he broke up with her sometime in december I believe, both him and Conti trended on Twitter soon after and she """quit""" for five seconds because she has a really thin skin Twitter trolls while Samuel flailed around about "respecting our privacy" (which became a running gag nowadays, because they've always been placating it all over sOcIaL mEdIa), then they finally came out at the end of the year which was... not well received to put it lightly, mostly because they're horrendously obnoxious and immature about it (think young teenagers in their first relationship). Basically, everyone and their dog think that The Tongue is some vain clown who dumped his girlfriend who followed him everywhere during his indy days for a hot piece of ass the second he could, and Conti as a homewrecker pretty much.

In Tony Khan's mind, this giant mess is THE PERFECT BABYFACE COUPLE!!!

I agree that putting these two on TV together babyfaces was risky, and if you're saying that taking the risk at all shows bad judgment on Tony's part, I can understand your argument and mostly agree with it, but- as someone who doesn't follow the vlogs or Twitter drama, I think this very well could have worked for me if Sammy were actually capable of cutting a real babyface promo. The people who watch the shoulder content are only a small fraction of the audience, and I presume it wasn't even the full amount of those people who were upset at them. For people who either didn't know the drama or (also like me) do their best to try to fuller out knowledge of real person from the character I see on TV, a good babyface promo would have made them babyfaces.
The problem is that Sammy can't. He only knows how to cut a PWG babyface promo, where everything is about putting on the best performance you can, and there are no storylines and thus no emotions other than the performative resilience and anger during a match and the thrill of victory or agony of defeat afterwards which are also purely performative because the results of the matches don't actually matter to anything. And as a result,his claim to now want revenge is undermined by the fact that he pretty much told us that all of the emotions he had displayed previously were unimportant because he only cared about giving the fans a good show, so why should we think that his emotions in this angle are any more real than the emotions in all of his previous angles? It's the same thing as the Russo "everything else is fake, but now I'm telling you that this thing I'm doing now is a shoot."

I'll even cut Tony some slack for being willing to take the risk, just because if you want to get the belt onto Sky and you want to build to the natural Conti vs. PVZ match, doing what they did is a great way to kill two birds with one stone... although, again, it would have been better if you either had Sammy and Tay be an on-screen pairing first, or if you had just started having them interact on screen a week or two before (maybe in an effort to replace the big hole in his life that leaving the Inner Circle created, Sammy threw himself into his budding friendship with Tay) and then you use Tay coming out to check on Sammy here as a way to lead to the on-screen romance (at which point you're also building up for the big moment of the first kiss, etc, a la Matt and Lita, or Otis and Mandy).

As for the thing with the fiancee a few months ago, I had completely forgotten about it. And if I- someone who writes a review of the show every week- forgot about it, then I think it's fair to assume that a good chunk of the audience did as well.
But even if some number of viewers did remember it, I don't think it's fair to hold that angle against this one, because sometimes in life- be it real life or kayfabe life, stuff just happens and people break up (and the kayfabe story is not that Sammy was cheating on the other woman with Tay, even if that might have been what happened in real life). I'd use it as an argument for why you shouldn't do a segment like that if you have no kayfabe plans to follow up on it, as it only creates some potential future awkwardness, and I'd use the fact that I had completely forgotten about it a few months later to illustrate that moments like that don't mean anything without any kayfabe build, but I don't think that holding that segment (and the entire kayfabe existence of Sammy's ex-fiancee) against this storyline or even against the idea to give Sammy and Tay a shot as a babyface unit is fair.