If you watched Fyter Fest, you may have been struck by just how violent the show was, from Cody Rhodes taking an unprotected chair shot to the head to literally the entire Jon Moxley vs. Joey Janela match. It wouldn’t be unfair to wonder, then, if that level of violence is something we should expect more of from AEW moving forward.
The answer is, well, it depends.
Allow Tony Khan to explain, as he did to the media (via Chris Van Vliet on YouTube):
”No, no, no, definitely (don’t expect these things on TV). This was not TV, this was a streaming show. It was effectively a pay-per-view in a lot of the world. In the U.S. it was presented free but this was a pay-per-view, and so you can expect different rules for pay-per-view. And we said going in these are unsanctioned hardcore matches, and I think that expectation was going in and we wouldn’t have advertised that kind of violence, you know? We wouldn’t have offered that on TNT, 100-percent no.”
It should go without saying that television is a different animal than PPV. Put simply, they’ll have more freedom to take things much further on events like this while we can expect a toned down version on TV. Which is how it should be, of course.
You pay to see the good stuff, right?