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TONY KHAN JUST NEEDS TO LOOK TO HIS OWN PAST TO SET THE RIGHT COURSE FOR COLLISION

Going into the first episode of AEW Collision, I wasn’t sure what to expect audience-wise for the show.  Saturday evening is a tough, tough time slot to program and draw an audience given it’s going out night for a lot of younger folks.  While I figured that a lot of people would be interested in the return of CM Punk and also that the first episode of a new show is usually among, if not, the most watched, I still couldn’t gauge what the show would draw.  When Mike Johnson posited a guess at 500,000, I figured it would be more than that.  I just didn’t know how much more.

It turned out to be significantly higher as the debut edition of the show did 816,000 viewers, including a 0.33 in the demo.  They actually beat Dynamite’s demo, thought if the Elite vs. BCC match hadn’t caused so many viewers to turn the show off I think they would have been closer.  For the evening, the show only trailed The US Open on NBC, UFC Fight Night and The College World Series on ESPN in the demo.  That is impressive, for sure. And while it was only one show and we can’t jump to any conclusions about what will happen going forward, as we saw by the final quarter out growing off of the one that preceded it, it was a better pattern than has been the case on most Dynamites for a while now.  According to Wrestlenomics.com, Collision opened with 868,000 viewers for Punk’s promo and the final quarter did 834,000 viewers, a loss of 4% of the audience from start to finish.  Contrast that with the 24 percent of the audience that dropped from the start of the 6/14 edition of Dynamite until the end and Tony Khan has to be very happy with the performance of Collision in Week 1.  

But we have to remember, it was just one week.  With that said, there is no reason that Saturday’s show has to follow the troubling pattern of its Wednesday counterpart.  People stayed on Saturday to see Punk’s first match, for sure, but there no reason that audience retention can’t become the regular pattern.  From where I sit, what made Collision different from Dynamite could hold the answer to that.

From where I sit Dynamite has always been about moves and actions, things going 100 miles an hour.  The end of last week’s show had so much happen in a couple of minutes there wasn’t any time to process it all.  To me, that is a regular problem with Dynamite, it moves way too fast and there is no time for things to sink in the viewer’s mind.  We are always on to the next thing instead of processing the last thing.  It’s very ADD to me.  

To the audience that watches that show and loves it, that’s great.  But as we have seen with the last quarter hour dropping significantly from the start most weeks, clearly there are fans who don’t make it through the entire show after giving it a chance.  They have all of the action that they could possibly ask for, yet they turn the show off.  Maybe it’s because they have seen it all before and while it’s fast paced, it’s still just action with no storyline substance to the fans that turn it off.

That begs the question why do the same thing on a different night?  To me, the answer is don’t!

Dynamite is what it is, so make Collision something different.  Focus on the characters for the fans who like to know the who about the person in the match.  Focus more on the stories, so people know the why.  There’s no need to have two shows that go 100 miles per hour, especially when the existing one drives away 20% of the audience almost every week, so make Collision the one that takes its time and works to make the viewer invest in characters and storylines.  I am not saying don’t have any matches.  I am saying make sure each of those matches has a reason and a purpose.  Not everything on the show has to be a “five star bout”.  In fact, just the opposite.  Give a guy like Miro a bunch of big wins and make the fans clamor for him to fight, say, Punk.  The longer you keep them away from each other, the more it will resonate when they hook up.  You can’t have a real dream match if you haven’t ever gone to sleep first.  Real dream matches are called for by the fans, not the promoter.  The promoter pulls the strings that make the fans clamor for the match.  

At the end of the day, Rampage started even hotter than Collision did (of course, Dynamite was also hotter then).  When it became more of the same, just an extension of Wednesday, it because missable.  It never recovered from that.

Tony Khan needs to learn from that mistake and make Collision as different from Dynamite as he can.  If both shows do well, we all win.

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