AEW Booms and Duds: Why is Mr. Brodie a Vince McMahon parody?

With our new normal of empty-arena shows, AEW spiced things up with last night’s edition of Dynamite. There’s a new men’s championship (TNT Championship), and the first four announced participants competed together in a tag match.

After repeated calls from fans (such as myself), AEW introduced the TNT Championship Tournament on the Mar. 30 episode of “ROAD TO DYNAMITE.”

While we didn’t know the parameters of the championship (such as who qualifies and if you are allowed to be in the tag/world title pictures) heading into Dynamite, we did know it was an eight-man bracket.

We also knew four of the participants in Cody, Shawn Spears, Darby Allin, and Sammy Guevara.

I have advocated for months now to build a secondary title around a foursome of Allin, Guevara, Kip Sabian, and one of either Joey Janela, MJF, or Jungle Boy.

Particularly with the first two, they have gained a lot of momentum and star power through their affiliation with The Inner Circle (Guevara) and Allin’s matches with Cody, Jon Moxley, Chris Jericho, and Guevara.

This championship, hopefully, will be used to create more stars rather than reinforce the star power of those at the top of the card. This doesn’t mean the likes of Cody or Kenny Omega can’t compete for the title; I just think it would be better if they challenged for the TNT Championship without capturing the title.

Than again, having someone like PAC or Adam “Hangman” Page win the title and have a six to 12 month reign as champion while defending the championship regularly may raise the prestige of the title as it is bequeathed to someone like Allin or Guevara.

Beyond setting up the TNT Championship Tournament, there were many notable occurrences on last night’s show.

Before that, as a reminder of my criteria, I’m not going to run through each match/segment. Rather, I will identify a couple of segments that either worked (“boom”) or didn’t for whatever reason (“dud”).

My criteria includes quality of match/segment and how it starts and/or builds stories. After all, we watch partly to be caught up in the stories. If a great work-rate match happens with no context or bearing on the stories, it’s going to be a miss.

Also, just because something is a hit/miss doesn’t mean it was an overwhelming choice. The selection could be 51 percent hit, 75 percent miss, and so on.

There are other subtleties to my criteria, but those are pretty much the parameters.

Let’s also agree that we should all be grading these shows on a bit of curve for pretty much any promotion. Rosters are limited right now, and for AEW, wrestlers have the option of staying home.