Has WWE NXT TakeOver Become Too Good?
By Bryan Heaton
The WWE NXT TakeOver series has produced some great shows since its inception. But have they given us too much of a good thing?
On Wednesday, June 8, WWE NXT produced the latest event in the TakeOver series. As has been the usual response to one of these events, NXT TakeOver: The End is receiving mainly positive reviews and praise from both fans and critics.
However, what I’ve noticed while watching several of the TakeOver shows is that the cards are always packed to the gills with entertaining action, leaving little room for fans both in the audience and watch at home to catch their breath and regroup.
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Look at The End, for starters (see what I did there?). Even the matches that could be seen as “subpar” were still exciting. I don’t think anyone would argue that the show peaked with the tag team championship match early on, but Austin Aries and Shinsuke Nakamura put on a great display as well – albeit in a different style that focused more on storytelling, in my opinion.
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After Nakamura defeated Aries, the two singles championship matches each featured fierce action, but – again, in my opinion – suffered from crowd fatigue. Great matches to settle heated rivalries shouldn’t be the kind of thing you can zone out during – it should be impossible to take your eyes off for a second of it!
Perhaps the shows would benefit from a reorganizing the card and putting matches in a different order. The audience needs a break, so why not give them something somewhere between two hot matches? As much as the fans – myself included – want to see blistering action for two hours with no let-up, there’s a reason cool-down matches exist in other areas.
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Possibly the best TakeOver to date was the event in Brooklyn last summer. I was fortunate enough to be in the crowd, and I can say that by the time Kevin Owens and Finn Balor made their way to the ring, I was exhausted. Bayley and Sasha Banks had just put on a clinic, and I would have loved nothing more than to see, like, the Baron Corbin vs. Samoa Joe match come between the two championship matches. You just need a mental break.
I completely understand the time constraints involved – TakeOver gets two hours every couple of months, and you don’t want to waste any time on something that’s not in the best interests of the talent involved. But plotting out the show differently could help the flow.
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What do you think? Could TakeOver: Brooklyn 2 benefit from a mental break match before the main event(s)? Or is the current formula of “turn it up to 11 for two hours” working out just fine?