Jeff Jarrett on Today's Pro Wrestling Landscape: "We Are Pop Culture." (Exclusive)
07/25/2023 12:27 pm EDT
All Elite Wrestling currently boasts the most amount of programming it has ever had. When AEW broke onto the scene in 2019, the company was running one-off pay-per-view events on Bleacher Report Live. That eventually transformed into a weekly television product, AEW Dynamite, on TNT. Less than two years after hitting cable, AEW would add a third hour of televised content to its Warner Bros. Discovery lineup in the form of AEW Rampage. The exponential broadcast growth continued this past June when AEW announced a third weekly series, AEW Collision, that would air in a primetime position on Saturday nights.
The addition of AEW Collision has raised questions about the future of AEW live events. AEW brought in WWE Hall of Famer Jeff Jarrettin November 2022 to help launch AEW House Rules, a non-televised live event series. With three televised shows being produced per week, there has been uncertainty about where AEW House Rules would fit in AEW's schedule.
Speaking to ComicBook.com's Brandon Davis at San Diego Comic-Con, Jarrett noted that more content only helps keep wrestling in the mainstream.
"Everybody says, 'That's going to kill the business. It's going to oversaturate it.' It's just getting bigger and bigger and bigger," Jarrett said. "Along with that, it comes more stars. You hear the word, 'Oh, it's a niche product.' Well, Bad Bunny and Logan Paul and Shaq, I could go down the list of celebrities. They're not niche. We are mainstream. It's not like we're striving to get in pop culture anymore. We are pop culture."
The surge of content also gives AEW a wider net for fan feedback, something that Jarrett emphasized is an aspect of the business that AEW takes very seriously.
"You have to [listen to the fans]. It's a barometer. I'm either blessed or cursed to be around this long, but you learn to decipher your feedback," Jarrett said. "You can look at a YouTube video and literally read their comments. The exact same video, go put it on Twitter, go put it on Instagram. I guarantee you that you're not going to see the same comments. There's different audiences per social media channel. There's a different mindset. Facebook's different. All in all, it's a barometer that you have to use. At the end of the day, the amount of impressions that we can give as talent throughout a single day? When I broke in, you had Saturday mornings for about 3-5 minutes as a talent to get over. Now you have 24.7, 365."
AEW returns to television this Wednesday with AEW Dynamite at 8 PM ET on TBS.
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