We don’t have a long history of praising Matt Hardy.
Normally the only times we get to write about him are when he’s main-eventing an especially bad episode of Impact Wrestling or driving his car into a tree and telling everyone he’s got angel blood. Sometimes he’ll take a cardboard cutout of his ex-girlfriend into the woods and shoot it with a handgun. Occasionally he’ll tase his girlfriend for fun or go hunting for ghosts in his house.
Today, goofy Matt Hardy’s in the news for … uh, well, making a really great point about WWE storytelling. You know how the last three months of WWE TV have felt like a rerun? Hardy knows one of the reasons why, and it has nothing to do with the bipartisan Big League Wrestling Company stuff wrestlers usually go for. Via Twitter:
It’s almost like a guy who’s been in the wrestling business for twenty years knows how wrestling should work.
It’s so difficult to explain to the “it’s just wrestling” crowd that wrestling can be a better version of itself and still be “just wrestling.” It’s amazing that a publicly-traded company that routinely draws hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue can’t have enough confidence in itself and its avenue of entertainment to maintain a consistent level of quality. Right now they seem so aimless and obsessed with maintaining a status quo, as though they’re gonna try something at the wrong time and somehow miss out on the next, accidental “boom.” Wrestling’s one of the only successful industries that hates itself. Could you imagine if it was owned and operated by people who loved it? People who worked hard to create fun characters that exist in a complex, colorful world and have feelings and consistent motivations? One that’d give you the opportunity to say, “no, it’s good, you just have to watch it,” and MEAN it?
Would that just be NXT?
