If I were Tony Khan, I’d expect some pushback to the idea that Revolution was the greatest PPV of all time. For one thing, some of us just don’t have a ton of nostalgia for Sting (sorry, I guess?) and it would have been nice if even one thing actually happened on this show to break up the monotony.

I can already hear AEW fans bristling. Look, the matches were good, okay? Nobody is saying the matches weren’t good. But very little happened, in the end. Just one title changed hands, which we all saw coming. Very few stories were advanced, though some certainly ended. There were no big debuts or surprise appearances, there wasn’t even any kind of standout performance on the undercard that nobody saw coming. It was a very straightforward wrestling show. Will Ospreay vs. Konosuke Takeshita, which was well-executed but desperately needed some kind of story behind it, didn’t even get the boost of having Ospreay split from Don Callis or something. The only thing that really qualifies as a surprise was the return of Kyle O’Reilly, but even that was done in very strange fashion, as O”Reilly didn’t get involved in the finish of Orange Cassidy vs. Roderick Strong and didn’t take any decisive action for or against the Undisputed Kingdom. As returns go, it was pretty weak.

In the end, apart from Sting’s last match, Revolution was just a lot of meat-and-potatoes wrestling, which is fine unless you prefer your food to have some spice. I get that anyone whose wrestling fandom doesn’t fall within the Venn diagram of “is fine with just a lot of good wrestling” and “misses WCW” probably shouldn’t be watching AEW, but since it’s my job to watch and tell you what I thought, what I thought was that it could have used some more flavor.

Written by Miles Schneiderman