Henry's World

 Though I didn't know it at the time, I entered wrestling at the absolute worst possible time. It wasn't really my fault, just the nature of when I was born, but by 2010, when I first discovered the business through the SmackDown vs Raw games and replays of the Nexus angle, most of the important, industry-altering events were well in the past. Anything I learned about the enormity of wrestling was all framed in the past, like Goldberg's undefeated streak, "Stone Cold" Steve Austin's rise to stardom, the death of the territories, or even the dual world title victories of Eddie Guerrero and Chris Benoit. Wrestling fans were growing more and more disinterested by the day, with the WWE in the creative doldrums, Ring of Honor losing every star they had grown, and TNA slowly withering after the woeful decision to challenge Vince McMahon on Monday nights. It really felt like wrestling might never truly matter again, but at the darkest hour, a single spark of light sh...

 In the absence of the backlog of Dynamite on Bleacher Report, my plan was to skip ahead to some of the newest episodes available, which did feel very odd. AEW is very careful with their long-form storytelling, making it a product that's difficult to jump in and jump out of whenever you want. So instead of attempting to digest a whole bunch of change at once, I'm going to cover their newest show, Rampage, which I can at least start from the beginning of. The absolute windfall of success that had followed AEW since the debut of Dynamite quickly had TNT hungering for more, and they initially proposed adding a third hour onto Dynamite. But AEW head honcho Tony Khan, having paid attention to the struggles of both WCW and the WWE after the expansion of their shows to 3 hours, elected instead to add a second weekly televised show, which found a home on Friday nights, airing just after the end of WWE's SmackDown. It's a timeslot with a glaring negative, as traditionally, late ...