AEW Booms/Duds: Cody Rhodes vs. Darby Allin could be the most storied rivalry

AEW Dynamite advertised a stacked show including hearing from World Champion Jon Moxley and two semifinal matches in the TNT Championship Tournament, highlighted by the third encounter between Cody and Darby Allin. Here are the “booms” and “duds” for Apr. 29.

I’ve continually praised AEW for the production of their empty-arena/taped shows. I’ve also criticized them for holding shows in the first place, including Double or Nothing in a few weeks.

To their credit, I’ve also highlighted how AEW is allowing talent to stay home and avoid shows if they feel unsafe with no repercussions.

AEW has done remarkably well in terms of creating segments to fill their taped shows, particularly in the video packages/segments we have received hyping Moxley vs. Jake Hager and the Scorpio Sky story that began last week.

However, with AEW resuming live airings next week, will they regress to the mean of having minimal videos, continue with their pace of almost untenable videos, or find a happy medium between the two?

The (probably) unnecessarily long Kenny Omega match last week aside, it hasn’t felt like AEW is just trying to fill time. Rather, it seemed like AEW was doing their best to make the most out of every second of their two-hour show.

Did that continue last night?

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.