Tonight All Elite Wrestling celebrates something many within the wrestling industry thought would never happen: the fifth anniversary of their flagship TV show, AEW Dynamite, which airs on TBS at 8 p.m. ET.
Since Dynamite launched on TNT on October 2, 2019, it’s provided a serious alternative to American wrestling fans disenchanted with WWE—or, depending on your taste, a nice complement to the dominant company in the industry. Along the way it’s launched two additional TV shows on Turner networks, assembled a roster of some of the greatest pro wrestlers of their era, and become the second most profitable wrestling promotion in history—or will be, after its not-too-secret new TV deal with Warner Brothers Discovery is announced, perhaps as soon as tonight.
Tonight’s Dynamite doesn’t just mark an important anniversary for the company. It also underscores how far the company has come in that time, while also paying tribute to its roots. Tonight’s main event pits Bryan Danielson against Kazuchika Okada, two of the greatest in-ring performers of this century, both of whom were champions and top stars for other companies during AEW’s first year. (When AEW officially launched in 2019, Danielson was the WWE World Champion; when Dynamite launched that October, Okada was New Japan’s IWGP Heavyweight Champion.) And AEW’s history will be celebrated tonight with matches featuring perhaps its two biggest home-made stars, Hangman Adam Page and Britt Baker. AEW has signed some of the biggest names in wrestling, and also helped establish some of the most exciting stars in the business today, showing once again the importance in having a second major national wrestling promotion.
Its growth hasn’t been without its challenges. The pandemic brought a lengthy end to touring and live audiences only five months into Dynamite’s life; without the personal wealth of owner Tony Khan and the support of a media company as significant as Warner Brothers, it’s likely Covid would’ve been the end of AEW. It also lost one of its original top stars, Cody Rhodes, who has helped spearhead WWE to a resurgence in popularity and acclaim. An ill-fated dalliance with mercurial star CM Punk greatly hurt AEW’s public perception among a healthy percentage of the wrestling audience, and further contributed to WWE’s revival when Punk subsequently returned to the company he once despised. And the toxic fandom the internet has incited in all manner of mediums has hit wrestling hard, with AEW, its wrestlers, and its owners a constant target of online invective from critics, WWE stans, and industry insider anti-AEW grifters like Eric Bischoff and Disco Inferno.
Not all of its challenges have come from the outside, though. Although AEW’s major storylines are usually booked with foresight and care, Khan (who is also in charge of creative) has made a number of unforced errors over the years. Stop-start pushes have cooled off once promising stars, it took years for the women’s division to feel as important as the men’s, the once-pivotal tag team scene is at an all-time low, and there’s often a lack of sustained follow-up for wrestlers who aren’t at the top of the card. Somehow technical problems plague Dynamite almost every week, five years in. AEW has given us some of the best wrestling storylines in years—see almost anything involving Hangman Adam Page for proof—but could use more focus and direction on the bottom half of the card. And AEW has also adopted some of WWE’s disreputable employment practices, such as classifying contracted wrestlers as “independent contractors” and unilaterally extending contracts for “injury time.” Along the way, ratings for Dynamite and its sister shows—Rampage and Collision—have dropped faster than the rate at which TBS (its cable home since 2022) has lost homes due to cord-cutting, and live attendance has generally dropped for its non-PPV shows.
Still, it’s not now, and never has been, the cartoonish disaster its biggest critics have always made it out to be—and creatively, it’s the best thing to happen to American wrestler in decades. Dynamite still finishes near the top of the ratings chart in the most important demo every week, and PPV sales have been consistently good throughout the company’s history. If Warner Brothers Discovery wasn’t happy with AEW’s performance, they wouldn’t be handing it the new deal they’re rumored to be announcing any day now. And, most importantly to wrestling fans like me, AEW is the most enjoyable weekly wrestling show since the 1990s (maybe since the height of Jim Crockett Promotions in the ‘80s), and the best from an in-ring perspective that we’ve ever seen here in the States.
Behind the reliably great in-ring action and lucrative TV deals, the most visible sign of AEW’s success is how its sheer existence has driven so many other people irresponsibly, cringingly insane—from the flood of anonymous social media accounts (some of which are unquestionably bots, but many of which are clearly run by real and deeply disturbed individuals) that exist solely to insult AEW and its employees and supporters, to media and industry figures that sold whatever integrity they might have had to the anti-AEW grift, and even to the perpetually gotten-to WWE, who has loved nothing more than treating any competition with petty, childlike contempt for four decades and counting, and couldn’t help themselves with AEW.
WWE itself should be thankful that AEW exists. While it couldn’t help but get a creative boost from the ouster of its defining figure, Vince McMahon (who was forced out of the company in 2022 after paying millions to settle sexual harassment and rape allegations, somehow returned to power and engineered a merger of the company with the UFC, and then was forced out once again in early 2024 after reneging on those payouts and getting both himself and WWE sued for sexual trafficking), the company’s renewed focus on exposition-heavy, melodramatic storylines have propelled it to its most financially successful era ever. Despite losing its TV deal with Fox, WWE has somehow thrived over the last two years, inking a massive new long term contract with Netflix and setting several records for live gates around the world. Sure, there are all manner of little details you can point out to mitigate those facts, but they remain facts: WWE has been on a host streak since 2022. And, as in WWE’s other two main boom periods—the late ‘90s “attitude era” and its original national expansion in the ‘80s—that success has been spurred on by the presence of legitimate competition, something the company didn’t face between 2000 and 2019.
Together AEW’s existence and WWE’s renewed success have highlighted the divide between pro wrestling fans and WWE fans. Much of the online mockery of AEW is driven by people who clearly believe WWE’s version of pro wrestling is the only legitimate one. WWE is often compared to “the major leagues,” which totally misreads this dichotomy; that’s like somebody stanning for one specific Hollywood studio, acting like only Paramount makes real movies and Warner Brothers or Columbia are failures that just need to quit trying. And WWE’s reliance on heavy-handed storytelling and talking—sometimes even during matches—has inspired one of the most wrongheaded AEW critiques, one that somehow won’t die despite how transparently incorrect it is: that AEW doesn’t tell stories. Because apparently in-ring stories don’t count, unless they include mid-match soliloquies, and booking matches for TV the way wrestling has done for almost all of its televised history somehow means stories aren’t being told.
You can’t talk about the history of AEW without discussing the successes of its major rival and the unhinged reactions from the most vocal WWE stans, but this isn’t a day to dwell on the critics, though—no matter how loud, persistent, and wrong they might be. Tonight Dynamite will give wrestling fans two possible classics, with Will Ospreay and Ricochet renewing their generational New Japan rivalry, and Danielson and Okada facing each other again. Meanwhile AEW’s biggest homemade women’s star, Britt Baker, will be in action in her hometown against Serena Deeb, and Page will wrestle Juice Robinson.
AEW’s impact on the wrestling industry has been massive over the last five years. It’s given wrestlers more opportunity to make big money, it’s given fans the mainstream alternative that’s been missing from American wrestling since the early ‘00s, and it’s exposed fans to styles and performers they’d never see in WWE. From its founders in the Elite—Kenny Omega and the Young Bucks—to Page, Swerve Strickland, MJF, Darby Allin, Orange Cassidy, and so many more, Dynamite has given wrestlers who don’t fit WWE’s restrictive mold a national TV spotlight every week for five years, while given fans the kind of wrestling and wrestling stories WWE won’t. Even if they weren’t on the verge of a new TV deal—even if Dynamite hadn’t made it to five years—AEW would be an artistic success for that reason alone.
Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, TV, travel, theme parks, wrestling, and more. He’s also on Twitter @grmartin.