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CALDWELL'S TNA IMPACT REPORT 4/5: Where was Eric Young?, Why is Rob Terry on my TV?, What's the over/under on Kurt Angle dying in the ring?

Apr 6, 2010 - 10:51:40 AM
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TNA Impact Report on Spike TV
April 5, 2010
Live in Orlando, Fla.
Report by James Caldwell, Torch assistant editor


This week's episode of TNA Impact must have looked really good on paper when the creative team came up with the show. They attempted to get heat on the heels, deliver at least one good wrestling match, set up Lockdown, deliver Vince Russo's style of T&A, and carry out vendettas against critics.

The execution, as usual, was horrendous, baffling, inept, inane, and the product of a creative team stuck in another decade.

Beyond anything content-wise on the show, the worst part of the show was watching Kurt Angle in the ring. Even before taking a back-of-the-head dive out of the ring to the floor, the way he hobbled around the ring like Montgomery Burns on the Simpsons was disturbing to watch. The man is darn-near hunched-over when he walks and he can barely stand upright.

Either TNA is going to protect this man by getting him out of the ring or he will die inside the ring. There is precedent. It happened with Mitsuharu Misawa last year. But, considering this is the same company that continues to be defiant with chair shots to the head by having Rob Terry take a direct, clean shot right to the forehead on live TV during this show, I'm pretty sure health issues are the last thing on TNA management's mind.

As for the content of the show, where was Eric Young? Seriously. They gave him a mega-push last week, he won the main event steel cage match with a top-of-the-cage elbow drop, and he was absolutely nowhere to be found on this week's show.

One of the biggest issues with TNA is the lack of continuity from week-to-week where the audience cannot emotionally invest in the product when the characters and storylines change from week-to-week.

We saw it in the opening segment when Sting appeared out of nowhere again to perhaps finally explain why he turned heel. It was four weeks ago! Who cares now?

Last week, I felt the show reached dangerous territory of becoming irrelevant. This week, the show felt more alive due to it being live, but Impact continues to come across like six or seven mini-shows scattered across two hours without a central, over-riding theme uniting all of the segments together.

Championships don't mean anything. The Knockouts Title was a prize from the vending machine in a silly Lockbox gimmick. TNA World Hvt. champ A.J. Styles vs. The Pope received minimal hype before their PPV title match at Lockdown. Matt Morgan is deciding who gets to hold his other cracker-jack title belt. The Machineguns won a #1 contender match to the tag titles at Destination X and TNA forgot that even happened.

Meanwhile, TNA decided they would try to out-play the NCAA Title game by building to T&A in the main event slot on the show. It was a cheap attempt to pop a rating from a desperate promotion hanging on by a thread creatively and without any original ideas.

At the end of the day, TNA is trying to aim at everyone by throwing everything against the wall, but it's not working. Want to see Legends? Well, here's Ric Flair in a wheelchair hanging around with a clown (Abyss) and an older clown (Sting). Want to see good wrestling? Here's broken-down Kurt Angle. Want to see Jeff Hardy and RVD? Here they are as a collective, watered-down unit rather than standing out as individuals. Want to see the X Division? Here's Doug Williams, the heel, defending good technical wrestling and knocking high-flying X Division wrestling, as if they're mutually exclusive, further confusing fans. Just want to see a decent, coherent wrestling show? Ha, go watch the "boring" WWE Raw product.

Why does a decent, coherent wrestling show have to be considered boring? It's TNA's way of covering for what has become obvious - they're not capable of thinking through six weeks worth of storylines and trying to keep track of what happened four weeks ago and how it affects this week's show, so they try to cover for their inefficiencies by throwing as much on the TV show in hopes that viewers will simply forget what happened in the past and be distracted by the endless stream of NOISE throughout a two-hour show.

On paper, the show looked fine. Heat on the heels. One good wrestling match. Star power. Some measure of build-up to Lockdown. Taken as a whole and looking at the big picture of where TNA is right now with a lack of consistent storytelling, watered-down characters, no consequences to actions, no identity, an unclear marketing vision, and an overall lack of common decency, it's a broken-down product.

We welcome your 0-10 score and comments on this show for an "Impact Reax" feature in the Torch Feedback section of PWTorch.com. To contribute your thoughts on Impact, click here.


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