Cup of coffee in the big time: Impact needs to shake sins of the past to regain fan trust

Impact Wrestling is good now — or, if not good, it’s certainly not bad.

And make no mistake, for a long, long time, Impact has been bad. Much of the time it went way past bad and into abysmal.

I consume a fairly ridiculous amount of pro wrestling every week, but I still have trouble bringing myself to turn on Impact’s weekly TV. That hasn’t changed despite knowing Impact has changed its ways and put the focus on deserving talent.

It would seem I’m not alone on that.

Slammiversary was a great show, a far better pay-per-view effort than almost every PPV effort put out by WWE this year.

The buzz from the event led to a bump in TV ratings for one week, but that only lasted a week before last week delivered the lowest ratings of the year, with the show pulling in just 248,000 viewers.

Here’s a chart tracking Impact’s TV ratings since June:

Why can’t the promotion seem to hold momentum, even if it is an undoubtably improved product?

For me, anyway, it’s hard to shift my thinking away from the many, many times I’ve been burned by buying into the hype, tuning in and getting the same old miserable product. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me roughly 20 times ... I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure my children were born with some sort of inherited Impact-related shame.

This is, remember, a promotion which once used a wrestling match as a paternity test.

That’s the battle for Impact, breaking the mentality, even if the product on the whole is so vastly improved, of people who have been burned too many times.

And that means ditching this kind of awful, awful garbage:

That’s oldschool TNA/Impact.

And nobody wants that. And when it’s there, the PTSD kicks in and I expect the screen to flicker to static before Dixie Carter crawls out of my TV like Samara in The Ring.

• Here’s a preview for tonight’s edition of Impact, and you can join in our live blog tonight.
• We also have a recap of last night’s edition of NXT, which featured Keith Lee’s debut.
• There’s also a mystery developing over at NXT. Which probably relates to our reserved excitement on the Takeover triple threat.
• If you want your Mae Young Classic spoiled, we’ve got you.
• While the tournament is happening now, you’ll have a while before you get to watch it. Though the methods for release have changed this time around.
• Smackdown Live took a ratings dip this week.

We’ve almost got the week beat. Let’s finish strong and drop it on its head.