Libbie Fudim said:
Love me or hate me, but spare me your indifference.
You can't say anything negative about TNA on these forums without it turning into a shitfest, so let me try to put it in a frame of reference first for people who'd otherwise (and probably still will) hit me with the standard canards.
1) This has nothing to do with the WWE.
2) This has almost nothing to do with TNA plotlines, once you get past that we'll have to talk about TNA actors.
3) If you're here, you're part of the IWC. If you're talking about wrestling here in anything but strict kayfaybe, you're an IWC smark. Don't bother using the term here to try to insult someone else.
First, some background on me and TNA. I first started watching TNA in mid-2007, when as part of a job I held I was given comp tickets to a WWE event. I hadn't watched wrestling in a while; throughout the early part of the decade, I was pretty much totally turned off to the product. Watching it made me realize that I still had interest in professional wrestling, and outside of the show, people were papering for a card to benefit a high school band (maybe not the band, but a high school organization) featuring Kurt Angle and some guy named Christian Cage. (The association between Cage's ring name and the "Christian" I had known earlier was not immediate upon name recognition.) I asked people I knew who still watched what the hell Kurt Angle had done to be performing in a high school gym, and that's how I found out about TNA.
The product was different. It wasn't love at first sight. The six-sided ring threw me off a bit. But what I grew to love was that it was unabashed wrestling. It was hokey at times, without being self-conscious about being hokey. There were characters like Shark Boy and later Curry Man; something you would think no self-respecting wrestling promotion would promote. They weren't presented as jokes, or comedy bits; one thing I liked about the show was that the comedy bit was a rarity.
But one thing I really loved about TNA is that they strove to be different. They failed- sometimes miserably (Frank Trigg, AJ says "hi!"), but they weren't afraid to try things to see if they worked, like the Ultimate X match. They weren't different in a "our competition won't do this, so we will" sense; they were different in a "let's open some new ground" sense.
It wasn't always pretty, but it was always honest with me. 2009 was a fond year for me and TNA; the Main Event Mafia was one of the better played gimmicks of the decade. (It was a Millionaire's Club that was heel, like the original should have been. That's why it worked that time around.) Eric Young got to drop the goofiness and show everyone what he was capable of, given the chance.
Then came 1/4. I had very high hopes. Professional wrestling, like any business, needs competition to be good. Otherwise, there's no point in improving your product. Eric Bischoff had struck gold once before, and Hulk Hogan had some residual curiousity appeal after his tour of Australia. But my worst fears quickly came to be recognized. Instead of the show being about Hogan and Bischoff promoting the wrestling stars TNA had, it became about the wrestlers TNA had becoming vehicles to promote Bischoff and Hogan. There were high spots- at first, I really liked AJ's development into his heel character. But Hogan was appearing in up to six segments a night. I've been tired of Hulk Hogan for running on two decades now. In limited doses he's still great. But I was overdosing on Hogan, fast.
It was during RVD's title win that I gave up on trying to be supportive of TNA. RVD, fresh into the company, the hot shit, wins the title and becomes the face of TNA- except the confetti that fell was red and yellow. (If you're going to say "but that was the Deception angle!", spare me. It's not like an image can have only one meaning, and it's not like you can have only one intent when you pitch an idea.) Instead of being about RVD, it was about Hogan. Again.
But still I tried to watch. Even though the product was growing less interesting to me by the week, I still tried to give it a chance. Soon, it became like a cheap episode of a serial drama. Veiled references to how something big was going to happen, without building the angle. Dixie Carter repeatedly making an ass of herself on Twitter and driving expectations to points TNA couldn't hope to satisfy. The "they" angle got to me the worst; it was a writer's trick I had learned in high school, and got chastised for using in college- I was told it was "beneath what I was capable of".
What got to me was the predictability of the big reveal. Hardy wasn't a big surprise; they'd need someone totally out of left field, and he was probably the only person with the star power to make it work. Everyone saw the Hogan/Bischoff turn coming; the real question was if they'd actually go through with something so predictable. But one thing I did like was that it put Jeff Hardy on center stage for a moment. Not because it was Jeff Hardy- I have no particular strong emotions towards him, positive or negative- but because it
wasn't Bischoff and Hogan. And so we went into last night's Impact.
The Hogan show continued. Jeff Hardy got all of about 90 seconds on the microphone in the follow-through segment to their biggest pay-per-view of the year, in what, as far as TNA is concerned, should be the biggest moment of Jeff Hardy's career. The segment wasn't about Jeff Hardy doing what it took to become a champion; the segment was about why Bischoff and Hogan 'did what they did'.
I give up. Eric Bischoff, Hulk Hogan, you killed something great for me. I would love you guys as secondary characters. You still have a place in the wrestling industry, and a large one. But I just don't want to watch a show that's about you anymore. The highlights of TNA are too few and far between these days that I'm no longer willing to force myself to watch you self-promote just to get to those parts. I don't want to see the faces give you your comeupance; I want the plot development where you just disappear.
Under your reign, TNA has become a pale WWE imitation, trying to differentiate themselves from the WWE by doing what the WWE won't do, and copying the rest. The TNA set is a late 1990's RAW set with a smaller 'titantron'. WWE won't do blood? We'll give you buckets full. When you try to be different by doing what someone else won't do, you inevitably remind people of who you're trying to differentiate yourself from. We stopped seeing fresh angles which went on despite their potential to fail; in the past year, we've had a Four Horseman rehash, an ECW Originals rehash, and now an nWo rehash. They aren't losing angles, but what's special about them?
For me, you killed off everything that made you different from a company which was stale and boring, and became a stale, boring imitation, publicly led by two people more interested in self-promotion than the business itself. (As an aside, you can't blame them. Money talks, bullshit walks, and they'll still want jobs after TNA.)
I'm all out of give-a-fuck. I've no interest in seeing the Hulk and Eric show, and it's time to stop pretending I do, just for the sake of there being a good #2 competitor. I wanted to like you, and I still do; but I'm not willing to pretend to enjoy a product that offers me so little I find interesting.
Folks may now proceed to tell me how my opinions are wrong, and that I only have them because I'm a brainwashed WWE zombie.
