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It needs to regain it's lost identity.
The lockdown shows for AEW were far better than WWEs lockdown era. AEW had a home base, a bit of personality, had roles for everyone, had reasons to tune in weekly like the TNT Open Challenges where you never knew who was going to turn up, and found a way to handle the no crowd issue by having the Dark roster there, Heels on one side and Faces on the other. WWE meanwhile was a sterile depressing bunch of screens of people in a zoom call watching Miz & Morrison get eaten alive by zombies or some shit.
Now AEW just feels like NXT Black and Gold now, the show they were beating by offering an alternative. It doesn't have Dark anymore for light hearted fun and to make sure everyone gets some appearance each week. There's barely any storylines going on. There's barely any characters. Matches just happen as they wait for the PPVs. Even the people we see weekly now are just the people we've already seen in WWE for the most part continuing their WWE personalities. At least when Brodie Lee and hell even Malakai Black and Miro jumped ship, they tried out new characters.
The thing is, people will still buy the PPVs. The audience is clearly there. But they aren't watching live and aren't going to shows. And why would they? You don't know the card to a day before. You want to buy tickets a month in advance only to get a Garcia vs Yuta main event? Why tune in to any show weekly when the best bits are on Youtube the next day? You hear a match is good, just watch it on catch-up. Miss a month, it's fine, the PPV will have the highlight reel of what you need to know. You can afford to miss episodes. And to be clear, you can usually do that with RAW and Smackdown too outside of Bloodline stuff when Sami was involved, and maybe Judgement Day stuff. But WWE aren't the ones trying to play catch up.
AEW needs to go back to the drawing board and remember what it's identity was.
