How To Watch Professional Wrestling
Professional wrestling is a lot of things: Live action stunt show. Theater in the round wearing sporting event as a costume. Quasi-imaginary fighting league, presented on television like Sports Night as written and performed by the cast of American Gladiators.
It runs on Kayfabe, the parallel dimension in which all wrestling exists and the narrative energy source by which all wrestling is fueled. This semi-permeable universe, protected by a membrane of metafictionality, is why most (adult) fans laugh when people ask If They Know It's Fake. Professional wrestling is bullshit, sure, but it's our bullshit and it's designed to make us feel true things.1
Those things can be the joy that comes from seeing Xavier Woods play "Taps" on a trombone as Big E pins another opponent to end a match, then join him in the ring to do the Whip and Nae Nae with their New Day stablemate Kofi Kingston. Or the thrill of watching Brock Lesnar, Human Wrecking Ball, literally rip the door off of a Cadillac and throw it 50 feet after destroying the car with axes.
MORE THAN JUST SPANDEX-CLAD MEN Pretending to fight
How It Works
Professional wrestling2 operates like a never-ending version of Comedy Bang! Bang! turned physical: Nigh-unlimited permutations of stock characters forever improvising with or against one another, trying to remain obvious enough about what they're doing that no one loses faith in where things are going (all while balancing on a web of tropes in the time allotted for each segment).
Matches and their accompanying storylines are developed by head writers/bookers/booking committees deciding who will be partnered with whom in a match/program, as well as the winner and the finish3 on a given night that either completes a given narrative thread or splits it off into several different potential directions going forward.
Professional wrestling is bullshit, sure, but it's our bullshit and it's designed to make us feel true things.
And while there's no "wrong" way to watch a show4, a willingness to accept that any sense of direct control is an illusion obscuring a quasi-predictable car crash whose inevitabilities can only be changed through collective action5 instead of deciding everything is the Best or the Worst is highly recommended. Understanding that the joy and the journey are the destination also helps as unreasonable expectations and assumptions of disappointment based on a limited grasp of storytelling conventions can (shockingly) lead to disappointment. Especially when things don't turn out exactly the way you planned (or, in wrestling parlance, "fantasy booked") them in your head.
Like coming to appreciate the lack of control, awareness of the hierarchy regarding the way and pace at which these stories are told helps tremendously. Televised promotions (usually) produce weekly shows – for WWE, it's Monday's Raw and Thursday's Smackdown! on cable, along with Main Event and Superstars on the WWE Network/Hulu – building towards monthly PPVs (like September's Night of Champions). These, in turn, usually build towards bigger flagship shows in a company's PPV armada, such as WrestleMania for the WWE or Wrestle Kingdom for New Japan Pro Wrestling which serve as showcases not just for their companies but the medium as a whole.
Understanding if you want to see resolution you'll need to pay for the privilege can also help temper expectations. Much in the same way that understanding that while some interesting shit might happen in Justice League: Darkseid War #3 (of 4), the real fireworks/Omega beaming aren't going to happen until they buy that final issue, appreciating that wrestling companies make their money on the upsell helps the bitter pill of capitalism go down smoother.
SHOULD YOU BE A JOHN CENA FAN?
Who To Watch
In the world of professional wrestling, the WWE is the NBA: a super league whose star power and global reach make it the biggest game in town even if the sheer volume of other quality organizations around the world prevent them from being the only name worth mentioning.
However, the performers working for them are likely the only ones you've ever heard of if you're not directly engaged in the "universe" of professional wrestling fandom. Along with highly decorated6 stalwarts like John Cena and Randy Orton7, the WWE also bring in nostalgia acts like WCW's8 Sting and continue to trot out stars of years past like The Rock and Chris Jericho when they need to goose ratings or feed the nostalgia trolls.
The lead antagonists – even if they are largely Heels in Name Only – are the highly underrated HHH and the incandescently brilliant Stephanie McMahon, who is rivaled only by her father Vince and Brock Lesnar's longtime agent Paul Heyman as the best "non-playable character" since Bobby Heenan left in 1993.
In the world of professional wrestling, the WWE is the NBA: a super league whose star power and global reach make it the biggest game in town
A litany of young stars in the company have begun to make their names, with performers like Seth Rollins, Roman Reigns, Dean Ambrose, Kevin Owens, Bray Wyatt, Luke Harper, Finn Balor, Sami Zayn, Cesaro, Neville (The Man That Gravity Forgot), Paige, Charlotte Flair, Becky Lynch, "The Boss" Sasha Banks, Bayley and the aforementioned Big E working their way up the card and into our hearts and minds. The young women on that list have been doing the Lord's work for much of the last year and are now in the midst of a "revolution," which essentially means "they put on good to great matches where performers actually work instead engaging in hair-pulling clusterkerfuffles".
Nearly every person mentioned in the previous paragraph made their way through WWE's current9 development program, NXT, with the only exception being "The Swiss Superman" Cesaro10. As such, NXT has quickly become WWE proper's biggest American rival for the hearts and minds of wrestling fans. It has provided a place for new WWE recruits to learn the company's best practices and for so-called smart fans to enjoy a product more directly geared towards them — the 30 Rock to Raw's SNL.11
There are also minor league operations12 where — along with larger but still decidedly second tier companies such as Ring of Honor and TNA (Total Nonstop Action)/Impact Wrestling — a not insignificant number of those who eventually find their way to the WWE made their names. Outside of America, companies like Mexico's AAA and CMLL, along with the aforementioned New Japan Pro Wrestling13, are the major brands in their respective countries and significantly eclipse the WWE's popularity in those regions.
WRESTLING WITH THE CANON
What You Should Watch
WWE and New Japan (heads up: everything is written in Japanese) as well as smaller and more experimental outfits like CHIKARA have made their archives available to anyone willing to pay, with some even capable of streaming live PPVs. And, while it hasn't happened yet, the narrative-heavy-and-entirely-constructed-as-a-TV-show14 style of cult hit Lucha Underground may be the next stage of wrestling's artistic evolution if binge-watching services like Netflix or Amazon throw their hats in the ring.
Which makes sense, as wrestling's level of content production is tailor made for on-demand culture. Entire series of television are generated by a single performer over the course of a given year, with most of their storylines punctuated periodically by single episode-long bits of action that are themselves then cobbled together as part of epic, movie-length shows. It's also a self-sustaining system on some level, with all of this data/footage pared down into magical movie trailers of awesomeness that make you want to pay more money to watch these same people pretend to fight each other the next month.
It can, of course, be a little overwhelming, with so much to see and so little direction as to what to watch. So, while this following list is in no way definitive, it should provide at least a little bit of clarity as to the very basic parts of how this whole sports entertainment enterprise works and what makes it so glorious:
Everything Is Wrestling
While your mileage may vary on certain bits of this, it's a fairly even-handed look – and a radical reinterpretation – of the intrinsic silliness/majesty of professional wrestling as a storytelling device. Also, enough cameos to make Entourage look like a reserved exploitation of its executive producer's rolodex.
The 'Cure For The Common Show'
In this video, Vince McMahon doesn't so much break the fourth wall as burn it at the stake for crimes against humanity. This segment essentially "allowed" the company to treat what they were doing not as a place where a series of happy accidents created compelling stories but where nearly everything that happened had a purpose and even that which didn't could eventually be given meaning. And legally, it helped get state athletic commissions off their backs.
'The Most Illegal Thing I've Ever Seen In The History of Wrestling'
In this video, The Osirian Portal — a tag team with an ancient Egyptian gimmick — uses mass hypnosis to make everyone get, for lack of a better term, funky. Which is to say, dem kids get after it. There's break dancing, mass hypnosis and even a tiny cardboard box stage. It is, essentially, all that professional wrestling/life should/can ever be, all at once.
That Dropkick, Though
On the complete opposite end of that spectrum is New Japan's Kazuchika Okada performing art in motion with the most beautiful dropkick ever recorded on film. Which is to say, while the storylines and metafictional elements of the show can be fascinating meditations on the nature of truth and falsity in the extramoral sense, sometimes you just want to see someone get kicked in the face via levitation.
The Power Of Positivity
In a nearly decade long, highly decorated career, the fact that Kofi Kingston's greatest moment is saying with a straight face "The Dudleys don't respect furniture. They have no regard for furniture," is why sports entertainment is God's gift to both sports and entertainment. That and the gong-assisted 2 Live Crew cover.
A WELL-ROUNDED WRESTLING MEDIA DIET
Who To Follow And What To Read
The great Marc Normandin helped out a great deal in compiling this list, which starts with the grand poobahs of internet wrestling writing: David "Davis" Shoemaker (AKA the Masked Man) and David "Dave" Meltzer. The former has created a place at Grantland for professional wrestling to be treated as a real fake thing, capable of being dissected and reviewed just the same as any other piece of pop art. The latter is a demi-god whose website/insider newspaper, The Wrestling Observer Newsletter, is considered the gold standard in honest wrestling related gossip. Which, for a world where the largest statues are built for the best liars, is quite a feat.
There's also Bill Hanstock at SB Nation, who provides perhaps the most moderate view of modern professional wrestling you'll find on the internet. He appreciates everything without blindly accepting anything that's fed to him. Along these same lines is Danielle Matheson, whose work on With Spandex lifts up the quality of an industry in desperate need of diverse, and perhaps more importantly, strong and resonant voices.
And finally, there's New Day's Big E whose Twitter game is so strong it makes me wonder how many characters he can bench at once.
As for extracurricular materials, it's mostly books, like Shoemaker's The Squared Circle, The Death of WCW by Meltzer's business partner Bryan Alvarez and WrestleCrap's RD Reynolds and Hitman, written by professional wrestling's Peyton Manning, Bret Hart, and perhaps the only genuinely essential wrestling autobiography (of which there are just a silly amount of "non-essential" cannon/bookshelf fodder.)
However, if you ever have the time to sit down and read some high quality long-form, it's hard to do better than Tom Breihan's look at the year CHIKARA disappeared into internet before reappearing in a cornfield.
It's about as real as fake can get.
To paraphrase Grant Morrison, who said essentially the same regarding professional wrestling's closest cousin, comics.
To clear up any potential confusion: the WWE refers to what they do as "sports entertainment", with their performers officially referred to as "WWE Superstars/Divas" as opposed to "professional wrestlers". HOWEVER, this is less marketing gimmick than mission statement, with company-wide emphasis on "telling stories in the ring" instead of "having what's in the ring to be the story." Most companies, even those that zig more in the E's direction refer to their products as "professional wrestling", to avoid being compared unfavorably with their considerable production advantages.
From there, the performers involved will work with each other and/or a producer/agent (usually an older former performer) to best articulate the story that the writing team has provided using tropes and tried/tested methods of audience engagement, all working towards one of four endpoints, with nearly unlimited possibilities: performer pins their opponents' shoulders to the ground for three, makes them submit due to a submission-related activity, cheats so egregiously enough to be disqualified or prevents them from returning to the ring in a reasonable timeframe following an expulsion. One performer usually takes the lead for the match and "calls" it as it goes along, with the pair (or trio, or foursome) using the reaction of the crowd to build towards specific pre-planned spots and the desired reactions for each of them. And then, out of this, the performers eventually start tumbling towards a climax, sometimes referred to as "slipping on the banana peel".
Outside of chanting "You Fucked Up" to performers who make mistakes while *literally* putting their health and safety on the line to entertain you and/or "CM Punk" during an AJ Lee match, pretty much everything else is somewhere between fair game and encouraged.
Read: loud cheering.
While matches are pre-determined, and as such, titles are *essentially* meaningless relative to Grand Slam trophies or Super Bowl rings, they occupy the same space as being named host of a famous television property (like the Tonight/Daily Show[s]). They aren't just symbolically but actively indicative of the support and belief your company has in you being a money making entity for them. And in professional wrestling, for better or worse, the only thing that genuinely matters is your ability to make the people around you money.
Cena, for those somehow unaware, is the Platonic ideal of a company spokesperson/standard bearer. Randy Orton, while lesser known outside of wrestling beyond the RKO OUTTA NOWHERE meme, is the Grecian ideal of a sports entertainer with a Peyton Manning pedigree and LeBron James level physical gifts. Seriously, he's like a magic wrestling machine made out of awesome.
To continue with the WWE = NBA analogy, WCW is the ABA, ECW::And 1, ROH/PWG/CZW, and by extension NXT::NCAA, and TNA::Isiah Thomas's CBA. New Japan is like if the entirety of Europe, South America and Asia played on the same team.
NXT rose from the ashes of Florida Championship Wrestling, the replacement for Deep South and Ohio Valley Wrestling, which had in turn replaced Memphis Championship Wrestling as WWE's designated "farm" team.
And he had what's widely considered NXT's best match with Sami Zayn essentially because (t)he(y) felt like it
For those who don't understand television well enough to fully understand the connection, SNL and 30 Rock – like Raw and NXT – are/were produced by the same company (Broadway Video) with an overlapping head writer (Tina Fey) and the same executive producer (Lorne Michaels). The former (like Raw) is presented as variety show with a specific genre serving as it foundation even as it's meant to appeal to the broadest possible audience, while the latter (like NXT) features a much more focused and deliberate look at the same genre while existing not outside of the former but in reference (and sometimes direct opposition) to it. If you plan on watching both, accepting this difference instead of expecting them to be the same is probably for the best.
There are almost literally too many to name, but Pro Wrestling Guerilla on the West coast and CZW, NYWC and CHIKARA on the East Coast have all produced performers that have made their way to the televised circuits where real money can be made.
Although it's difficult to find the time to discuss the company in too much detail, they are the closest thing to the WWE in the world and home to two of the best performers in this, or any other, generation: Shinsuke Nakamura and Kazuchika Okada. Nakamura is the wrestling equivalent of, both in the sense of talent and sheer presence, Freddie Mercury, while Okada possesses enough talent to be a Mike Trout-esque performer that threatens to redefine the idea of value in the business. The company's Wrestle Kingdom 9 show from January of this year is genuinely one of the great shows of the last decade and if you can get your hands on the English broadcast of it, do so. It's so totally worth the four hours.
As opposed to the traveling circus that produces between 8-14 hours of televised content a week.
