By Colin McGuire, ProWrestling.net Staffer
The date was August 13, 2021. The new kid on the block, AEW, decided it would spread its wings and expand its television footprint from one show a week to two shows a week. That second show was going to go by the name of “Rampage,” and it was slated to be the first weekly pro wrestling series to air Friday nights on a Turner network since WCW’s “Power Hour.” It was on this night, live from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that Christian Cage defeated Kenny Omega for the Impact World Championship. Everything had promise.
The next week, the unthinkable happened: CM Punk returned to pro wrestling. On this night, August 20, 2021, the second-ever episode of Rampage, the man born Phil Brooks returned to the world that made him a superstar and sent a Chicago, Illinois, crowd into a puddle of melted ice cream bars (in a good way, of course). The episode drew more than 1.1 million people. On a Friday night, no less. Merely two episodes into its run. The future of the 10 p.m. hour on TNT felt more than promising at this point; it was wildly exciting.
And now it’s over.
This Friday, TNT will officially air its final episode of Rampage. I know this because Tony Khan said so at the AEW TV tapings over the weekend. Or, well, he said Friday’s program will be the final episode of Rampage “for the foreseeable future,” which is good enough for me to say … “Yeah, we’re never seeing this thing again.” (Though, to be fair, I could certainly see there being a time during which the AEW braintrust thinks it can work fans into a frenzy with a potential return of the show for one night or one month or something, kind of like they did with the rankings system, only for the resurgence to die on the operating table one more time, but I digress).
Let’s get the revisionist history out of the way first: Rampage should have been canceled long before this week. Anyone who stuck with the show through thick and thin – or, in my case, covered it for the first two–plus years of its existence – knows this. In a lot of ways, it was the victim of a commitment to unintentionally define that hour of wrestling down to the point where it made no difference if you watched it, didn’t watch, read about it, didn’t read about it, or even bothered to look up the results. Rarely did anything happen on the show over the last year that made any impact whatsoever on any relevant story within the company.
The problem was that it didn’t know if it wanted to be a version of 1980s WWE Superstars, where squash matches and pre-taped promos ruled the day … or if it wanted to be Dynamite Lite, where you’d see some great wrestling packed into an even-more frantic format, considering how fast AEW television moves in the first place … or if it wanted its own identity, perhaps as an alternative to what we expected each Wednesday from Dynamite. The result somehow ended up being none of those and all of those at the same time, an amalgamation of programming that never found its identity in part because it insisted that each time someone tried to identify it, that identification was incorrect. In the end, it felt irrelevant because the people running it treated it like it was irrelevant.
And that was a shame because for a good, long while, TK insisted Rampage wasn’t going to be a B Show. In hindsight, he was ultimately right – it didn’t end up being a B Show; it was more like an F Show or an M Show. Nobody seemingly cared about putting it together in a thoughtful way, so nobody seemingly cared about consuming it in any thoughtful way (except for those tried and true sickos, of course). What once felt like an opportunity to take a next step towards growing the company turned into a series of Action Andretti vs. Kommander matches with the occasional hardcore women’s bout thrown in every so often.
So, yes. Let’s not get carried away being sentimental about something that most everyone agreed needed to go in the first place. Revisionist history, this is not.
But I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for this hour of TV and that’s because it was the first time I felt like I was covering real pro wrestling TV in real time. I started here by covering 205 Live (which half-assed turned into NXT Lvl Up, which, ironically, is also going dark this week), and when I was given the opportunity to write about AEW each week, I was beyond excited, thankful, hopeful … the list goes on. AEW, at that time, wasn’t just compelling; it was must-see. Then, with the addition of Punk on Rampage’s second episode, this was a company that was firing on all cylinders, and covering an hour of the product each week was a thrill.
After 176 episodes (not all of which I covered, as I left the beat around May 2023), Rampage has turned into a metaphor for where AEW is today. After so long, the episodes became repetitive, even boring. Rampage went from this exuberant, fresh hour of TV to a chore of a watch in only a couple years. Its once-promising direction turned into programs that felt like afterthoughts. In the show’s infancy, you’d see matches like Sammy Guevara vs. Andrade el Idolo for the TNT Title on a regular basis; these days, outside of Continental Classic matches, we get Mark Briscoe beating Ariya Daivari in almost 11 minutes. Don’t get me wrong. I love Briscoe. Daivari is fine. But how is this an A Show match?
And yet, despite the declining ratings and the rumblings from some fans that the show needed more booking love, AEW was content with hiding behind the idea that Rampage was more content for the network, and the network merely wanted more content, so everybody wins and everybody’s happy and Shut Up, We Got Our TV Deal! And yes, that is true. Nobody can deny those things. But why is “Pay more attention to making this better” not on the table? Somewhere along the way, there was a turning point that forced Rampage to feel like it was destined to go away. But why? It didn’t really have to end up like this. AEW has a phenomenal roster of talent. You mean to tell me you couldn’t put on three great matches with three compelling stories behind them each week? Okada just wrestled on the show the other week – but that was because of the Continental Classic. Do we think a star of that level would ever appear in a competitive match on Rampage under any other circumstance?
No. We do not.
And so, we are now forced to bid adieu (as one AEW star might say). The legacy of Rampage will be one accompanied by a shadow of unfulfilled promise, a concept that never lived up to its potential beyond its introductory run. The notion of what could have been will hover over its memory as it ages beyond its demise. The date was August 13, 2021. AEW Rampage was born and its only limit was the sky. Sadly, as it fades into the past, we now realize that despite hopes for the contrary, it barely ever left the ground.
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