All Elite Wrestling Celebrates TNT Anniversary; Tony Khan And Chris Jericho Look Back On Dynamite’s Year

Over the course of the last year, All Elite Wrestling has gone from an upstart in the wrestling world to an established weekly cable television presence, airing for two hours each week despite pandemic.

Since premiering on TNT in October 2019, AEW has consistently told compelling stories, nodding toward nostalgia while pushing the sport forward each Wednesday night. New, young stars have been created alongside legends, wrestlers who were once a fixture on the independent circuit have been exposed to a national audience and women’s wrestling has been embraced.

Listening to the fan has been a critical component in Dynamite’s early success, a mentality which starts at the top. AEW founder, co-owner, president, and CEO Tony Khan, was famously a longtime fan prior to his involvement with AEW. 

“For me, looking at it as a fan, I knew that there was an opportunity here. And that’s why I jumped on this. I love wrestling - and knew that there was an appetite for more,” Khan said Monday, just two days removed from his 38th birthday. “I wanted to put myself in the place of the wrestling fan and, frankly, from a business perspective, the wrestling consumer. I can strongly relate to the reasons people had been frustrated with wrestling. And I could sense that there was a demand for another wrestling company, and another big wrestling TV show, and that there was a group of wrestlers available that you could build a great company around.”

Tonight at 8PM EST, Dynamite will celebrate one year on TNT with an anniversary show set to feature the defense of each of its four championship titles. 

TNT is no stranger to professional wrestling, having carried World Championship Wrestling’s flagship program WCW Monday Nitro each week from September 1996 through March 2001, airing it directly opposite WWE’s Monday Night Raw in what was then dubbed “The Monday Night Wars.” 

Wrestling’s return to TNT was born out of experience Khan cultivated as co-owner of the National Football League’s Jacksonville Jaguars and English Premier League soccer’s Fulham FC. 

This past January, thanks to the strength of Dynamite’s breakout success, TNT renewed the program through 2023 and Khan says an additional hour of programming is set to debut in 2021 via AEW’s partnership with WarnerMedia.

For Khan, the wrestling wheels began turning in 2018 following the success of a January event called “Wrestle Kingdom 12,” one promoted by New Japan Pro Wrestling which was co-headlined by a match featuring future AEW stars Kenny Omega and Chris Jericho at the 55,000 capacity Tokyo Dome. Months later, WWE would go on to sign massive new TV deals with USA Network and Fox worth more than $1 billion.

“In April of 2018, I was at a party and the light bulb kind of went off. It was just the right time and the right economy. ‘Wrestle Kingdom,’ to me, was a success largely because of the Chris Jericho vs. Kenny Omega main event,” Khan recalled. “That match, when they drew that crowd and did that audience on streaming for it, and built up the streaming subscribers, I saw that there was clearly a market for another wrestling company. And that if you could do that business here with New Japan Pro Wrestling, imagine if you had a TV partner,” he explained. 

“I asked Kevin Reilly if he was thinking of bidding on wrestling TV rights. And he was,” said Khan, recalling a conversation with the then president of TNT and TBS. “There was going to be a lot of money spent on wrestling TV rights in the months ahead with [WWE’s] Raw and Smackdown being up for bid. And I said to Kevin, ‘There could be a chance to develop a show rather than going out and committing hundreds of millions, or over a billion dollars, in guarantees. I think we can do something really exciting here.’ And that’s how we got our foot in the door with this great media partner,” he said. “We’ve had so much success there. Kevin has moved on but I’m so grateful for the relationship with TNT. That’s what gave me the idea to do it before I had reached out to anybody or contacted people. That’s kind of what led me down this path.”

Since his pro wrestling debut on October 2, 1990, Jericho, 49, has long been one of wrestling’s biggest stars.

In 2001, he became the first undisputed World Wrestling Federation champion. His quick wit and affable demeanor also enabled crossover success along the way via reality shows like Dancing With the Stars and as a podcaster, best-selling author and frontman of rock group Fozzy.

By 2018, following a period spent mostly outside WWE’s main event picture, ‘Wrestle Kingdom,’ widely regarded as one of his best matches, marked a significant return to the top for Jericho. 

Emerging as AEW’s inaugural champion, Jericho appeared on the first Dynamite episode on October 2, 2019, a serendipitous affair which came 29 years to the day following his pro debut. Revitalized by the level of involvement he was allowed in the new promotion, Jericho set out to launch the new program, immediately legitimizing AEW in the minds of wrestling fans across America and around the world.

“For me, it’s been great. It’s funny that the one year anniversary of AEW falls on the same day as my wrestling anniversary. But had there been no AEW, I’m not sure that I’d be in the business right now at this point,” said Jericho. “I think the fact that we’re able to be so creative and it’s so much fun to be a part of this company - and be one of the reasons why it’s doing so well - has really reinvigorated my love and passion for the sport,” he said.  

“Something that we do in AEW is we plan - months and months ahead. We were planning something yesterday that might not happen until November of 2021. But that’s kind of the way we do it,” Jericho said. “I think if you have an overall goal and an overall plan, it makes it that much easier to tell the story that you want to tell. That’s what wrestling’s all about. It’s not about the moves - it’s about story. And the angle. Why these two guys are in the ring fighting. I always want to have a great story behind the matches that I do - a reason for it to exist. A beginning, middle and end - which we know, because we’re not planning on the fly.” 

Wrestling has long been underrated in its ability to tell great stories. In calling the matches, broadcasters help to advance the narrative created behind the scenes, filling in backstory or adding fuel to the fire, while the wrestlers color everything in with their work in and out of the ring. 

“It’s one of the hardest parts of my job. Because, at any given time, you could have six or eight or ten stories. Some of them are the most prominent ones, all over your television and we’re going to hype them up, lead matches on a pay-per-view. Others are key TV stories and they may not get resolved on pay-per-view - but that doesn’t mean they’re not important. It’s juggling stories,” Khan explained. “It’s interesting. Because it’s like the experiences from a sports team and it’s also similar to the experiences you’d have running a production in Hollywood being a showrunner and a writer. I find that it’s a combination of the two. You’re managing a roster of athletes but you’re also managing people’s screen time and people’s storylines. It’s a crazy hybrid of the two. I think that a lot of the dynamics that exist on a successful television show exist in wrestling. But a lot of the dynamics that exist in a sports franchise also exist.”

Jericho was involved in one of Dynamite’s most high profile stories, one which involved an altercation with polarizing boxing legend Mike Tyson. But he’s also worked closely with emerging young talent, helping to build them up and make them better, while embracing the process of collaborating with independent talents to expose them on the bigger stage cable television provides. 

“We have to build stars. That’s what we do. It’s the most important thing,” said Jericho. “I think when the company first started, it was on my back for the first few months. And that was great. I was up for the challenge and I did what I had to do. But, now, we’ve spread it amongst eight to ten people. Soon it will be more. We know how to build stars. And we understand the importance of building stars. And, if you look at our roster in 2020, and see how much bigger some of the wrestlers are now than they were a year ago at this time, it’s mind boggling how good of a job we’ve done. But it’s not rocket science - you just have to want to do it.”

Historically, it’s not always a role that’s been embraced by wrestlers of Jericho’s stature - but it’s one he seems to relish.

“Chris is amazing. That, really, in a lot of ways, was my first big opportunity - they kind of put the spotlight on me. I was so nervous about that,” said “Jungle Boy,” one of AEW’s brightest young stars, of working with Jericho on Dynamite. “Chris really went out of his way to put me over and make sure the whole thing worked. I think it’s just a testament to how good he is. Almost everything he touches becomes popular. He kind of has the golden touch. I’m so grateful to Chris for just being willing to do that. He has a real clear idea of what the mission is all of the time. And he’s not self-centered in going about it. It’s been really cool to learn from him and be able to share that stuff with him.”

“Jungle Boy” is the wrestling persona of Jack Perry, son of actor Luke Perry (Beverly Hills 90210, Riverdale), who passed away in March of 2019. With his father’s blessing, Perry, 23, began training to become a pro wrestler when he was only 10 years old, reveling in the sport with his dad from a young age.

Having worked the indie circuit for about five years before being discovered by AEW, one of the biggest challenges for Perry recently has been in learning to work Dynamite episodes filmed largely without a crowd out of an abundance of caution following the onset of COVID-19. Without the reaction of a live crowd to gauge, properly telling a compelling story that resonates on television comes with an increased level of difficulty.

“My outlook on wrestling has changed a lot in the last year. I’m always a fan of cool moves and doing cool stuff. But I think a year ago I thought that it was more about that. And now I’ve realized how much the story drives everything. The story is what makes you care about every move and what keeps people emotionally invested and tuning in. It makes all of the athleticism and everything else mean that much more,” Perry said. “The sound from the crowd is really how you gauge how well something is going. Normally, if you do something and there’s no reaction at all or it’s silent, that’s a bad sign. So when I first got there with no people, I was like, ‘How are we going to do this?’ It felt really weird and uncomfortable and all of that. But Tony Khan had some good ways of making it less awkward.”

“I think it was challenging not having the live crowd. That’s where I tried to come up with innovations that would be good for the show in the pandemic,” said Khan. “I was trying to watch other shows - not just wrestling but other shows outside wrestling. I was watching Jimmy Fallon and had seen what he was doing for his early pandemic shows when they were still in the studio. Jimmy did not have his full studio audience. He had his band and the production staff. And they were still there laughing at the jokes. Just like a wrestler is feeding off the live crowd, and playing off of that, and it’s an important part of the show, it’s the same with comedy. It can be jarring at first to hear comedians telling jokes without a live crowd to respond on a talk show. But that’s where having the band and production staff made a lot of difference when I was watching The Tonight Show,” said Khan. “For us, that’s where I said, ‘OK. We’ll come up with a seating area for the wrestlers.’”

Khan sat wrestlers and members of the production staff on each side of the ring - “good” guys on one side and “bad” guys on the other - safely filming his show outdoors at Daily’s Place in Jacksonville, Florida. The noise was immediately noticeable on television, helping things to sound a bit more normal. Those episodes resonated despite what was often a smaller talent roster to work with during the quarantine of early shelter-in-place orders. The show went on.

“It’s been a whirlwind. I think that would be the best way to describe it. We have seen a lot in one year of AEW. I think that we are going to be one of those companies that randomly can say that they weathered COVID,” said wrestler, ring announcer, manager and AEW Chief Brand Officer, Brandi Rhodes. “That was of course a curveball that nobody could see coming. But we’ve been able to navigate through that pretty successfully. It’s really been quite a ride.”

In the last several years, women’s wrestling has seen a resurgence, with prominent placement of great matches atop both television and pay-per-view, as close to a level playing field as pro wrestling has ever gotten.

It’s something AEW has embraced, with Rhodes taking everything a step further via the launch of “Heels,” a membership-driven celebration of wrestling fandom amongst women which nods in the direction of heels as wrestling jargon for “bad” guy. 

“‘Heels’ is something that I’ve always wondered why no one else has done. There’s obviously a very passionate fan base in wrestling that comes from women. So I had always wondered why we did not cater more to those women.,” said Rhodes. “I had the idea to put ‘Heels’ together as a place where women can come together that all love the same thing - pro wrestling - and talk about it how they want to: in Zoom calls, in forums, through email and make these connections with each other and have other people to share this with,” she continued. “We learned last week that on Dynamite, for the first time ever since the show began airing, women in the age group of 18-34 outnumbered men throughout the show. That’s huge. So that just goes to show that we are catering to an audience that is there and that we’ve listened to them in that respect and given them their voice and given them a reason to want to tune in to Dynamite each week.”

Last week, Dynamite celebrated 30 years of Chris Jericho. For his part, the wrestler is looking back via his latest book The Complete List of Chris Jericho. 

The new project chronicles his career in stunning fashion, noting specifically the way the wrestling world has changed, from the days when it was critical to stay in character outside the ring to today’s social media era where the curtain has been otherwise pulled back unlike ever before.

“I kept a list of every single match that I’ve ever had - from October 2, 1990 to last week. 2,722 matches. And I don’t think anybody else can say that they’ve kept a log of their matches that way. So I thought, ‘What an interesting kind of collection to start with. Let’s add some cool photos, do some top 10 lists, make it the coolest thing possible and put it out as more of almost a coffee table book,’” said Jericho of the forthcoming release (now available for pre-order). “When I first started, it was still very much a kayfabe business. You weren’t allowed to talk to your opponent before the match. You weren’t allowed to talk to them after the match if you went out to a club. The good guys and bad guys weren’t allowed to socialize at all. Secret handshakes, secret moves. It was a very different world back then.”

As he gears up for tonight’s one year celebration episode of Dynamite, Khan is looking ahead to a 2021 set to feature further expansion of the AEW brand via more programming, multiple video game releases, analysis of advanced statistics for possible inclusion in fantasy wrestling and on-demand video content.

While all of that falls under the unique umbrella that is sports entertainment, Khan remains clear on where his heart lies.

“From a merchandising standpoint, everybody joked that we were a t-shirt company when we first started. But now we’ve got a very successful TV show and we’ve done a lot of successful pay-per-views. We’ve launched our action figures. We’re going to have different types of video games for different platforms and different experiences. So there’s all kinds of new lines of business coming up for us,” he said. “Sports entertainment, in a lot of ways, is a very applicable term. But I don’t like it being used as a substitute for wrestling. It is a form of sports entertainment, what we do. But I also think that there’s no substitute for the word wrestling. I think it’s a great word. It makes me feel great when I say it. It brings a smile to my face. I love wrestling. I always have.”