Late Sunday night, TMZ broke the story that Spike TV informed Dixie Carter that they were cancelling TNA Impact Wrestling. It wasn’t exactly surprising, as Spike did the same thing when they were TNN to ECW, except that ECW was drawing a better rating than TNA had been. It also wasn’t surprising from the standpoint that TNA had been stale for a long time.
Now, TNA at least has more warning involved than ECW did. They have a contract locked in until October, so there is time to find a buyer for the company and/or the television rights. Fox Sports 1 could be a landing place, as it has plenty of time slots to fill. It may be that they will have to pay for TV time, or at minimum, no rights fee paid to them and a split of the advertising revenue. It’s not a hopeless situation, but it is pretty bad.
For whatever my opinion is worth, there are some ways TNA can help themselves, but it requires changing an ingrained culture that’s long existed there.
1. Stop wasting homegrown talent
This has been a pet peeve of mine for years. Samoa Joe, Christopher Daniels, AJ Styles…they have been criminally wasted. Samoa Joe gets constantly shunted to midcard status, and has blown years of his prime working in a place that does not appreciate him. He should be a star on the level of his fellow Samoan The Rock, but outside of hardcore wrestling fans, he’s an unknown. Styles left TNA a few months ago and returned to Ring of Honor. Daniels has been a constant transient in TNA, but in his early 40s now, he doesn’t have many years left, and he too has been wasted.
Robert Roode, James Storm, and Abyss have been pretty well used, but all too often, TNA has signed people that were released by WWE and immediately elevated them to main event status based on the fact that they have name recognition. WWE did not beat WCW in the end by signing WCW castoffs (although they took some of WCW’s homegrown talent and used it far better). They beat them by using their homegrown talent. Triple H, The Rock, Kane, The Undertaker, and many others joined with people like Steve Austin, Mick Foley, Chris Jericho, Eddie Guerrero, and Chris Benoit (all former WCW talent) to win the Monday Night Wars. All of the homegrown talent I mentioned, by the way, won the WWE championship during the battle with WCW.
2. Wrestling is your product, not sketches.
Many wrestling fans will tell you that the sideshow sketches that have been part and parcel of the WWE since Vince McMahon went national thirty years ago are useless and take away from the show. The only reason that a fair amount of them work is that McMahon has a world class writing staff working for him. TNA, on the other hand, has cycled through big names from the past, like Bruce Prichard, Vince Russo, Eric Bischoff, and Hulk Hogan himself. None of them could raise TNA up where it wanted to be. Part of that is that TNA recycled old WWE/WCW storylines. More of that is that their talent was never geared towards doing those things.
TNA’s roster has been known for having quality wrestlers, not people with any sort of acting ability. The guerilla style of shooting backstage segments, the stilted dialogue…TNA had a wrestling roster, and if they went out there and just had high-quality matches, I guarantee their ratings would’ve done better. Not RAW-level ratings, but better than the 1.1 rating they’d carried for the better part of the past two years. Quite frankly, TNA’s best years were when they stuck to the wrestling, when Jim Cornette and Dusty Rhodes were handling the booking. If you want to know how good Dusty’s booking and work is, watch NXT. Dusty Rhodes, at 70 years of age, is still producing quality wrestling and television, because he gets the business. Stick to your strengths. Drop the vast majority of promos and segments, get out there, and wrestle. Tell the story in the ring.
3. Stop taping weeks in advance.
I know it’d be asking a lot for TNA to go live every week, but by taping so far in advance, everyone reads the spoilers and often isn’t motivated to watch. Shows done so far out do nothing to enhance the product. If Eric Bischoff could go on Nitro in 1996 and give away results for taped RAW episodes, then there is no way TNA can reasonably expect to tape a month in advance and draw an audience that makes money.
The New York crowd for the past two Impact shows were solid. The Manhattan Center is a beautiful wrestling venue, as ECW and RAW both demonstrated in the past. That is an expensive place to tape, but the fans there beat the hell out of a theme park in Orlando. If that doesn’t work, they could go to Memphis. That city loves its wrestling, and kept Jerry Lawler in business for years as an owner, drawing monster ratings on local television for a promotion that lost its luster decades ago.
TNA needs, more than anything, to break the cycle of anticlimactic pay-per-views that follow shows that are taped a month at a time. They need to stop copying other people’s ideas and come up with their own. The talent pool in TNA is solid, and if they can goose up their ratings before October, they have the chance to start anew. Otherwise, a great bunch of talented wrestlers will be out of regular work, through no fault of their own, and that would be the greatest shame of this whole story.
What do you think? Comment below with your thoughts, opinions, feedback and anything else that was raised.