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| NWA Hollywood, where you can see this guy (without the urn though) Photo Credit: Online World of Wrestling |
What am I writing about? NWA Championship Wrestling from Hollywood is the subject, and it could end up being the next wave in serialized television for indie promotions across the country. It's broadcast locally in Southern California, but about a week after the show is first-run, it ends up on the Internet for the rest of the country to watch. I finally caught my first episode, as you could tell from the DVR Report this week. As you could also tell, I enjoyed the heck out of it.
Honestly, the exposure plan is ingenious, if you ask me. NWA Hollywood is not the first company to get local run television with bad hours, but it feels like they're the first - or if not the first, then the biggest name one to date - that is using the Internet to give that broadcast bigger amplification than any podunk little network could give it. And they're not just using their show as a way to advertise for house shows or other events. There are actual angles that are going on, a real, plot-driven show like RAW, only done completely on the indie stage. To me, that's how you do TV.
Where ROH failed with HDNet was that it was using TV as only a weak means to get people to go to house shows. The big happenings were always at the live events, while the TV show felt secondary, almost an afterthought. In 2011, that can't be the case. I understand wanting to drive up ticket sales and DVD sales for events, but there has to be some major free content, a reason to watch the show more than just "hey, watch our midcarders wrestle and come pay for the real magilla". The shows have to do more to get you to want to go to the events. That means running major league storylines on television and paying them off at the house shows, much like the way the PPV model used to work for the major companies before the idiots took over there.
Where NWA Hollywood has the advantage here though, is that the events ARE the TV tapings, it seems. So, not only do you get the major build up, the angles and main eventers in big angle building matches, but you get the payoffs there too. A few weeks ago, they televised the most major title change for the NWA World Championship since the company dissociated itself from TNA. Maybe the comparison to ROH is a bit disingenuous on that end, but then again, it's a good thing and it deserves to be lauded.
The other big bonus here is that it acts as a perfect companion piece to PWG, even if the two feds aren't connected in any way except the wrestlers that they use. While PWG does work angles and storylines, with their one-show-every-month slate, it's hard to really work intricate promos and angles into the proceedings. So really, it's more of a "general" sense of feud structure with a heavy dose of dream matches (not that there's anything wrong with that at all, mind you). This is great for exposing guys' ring work to the DVD-buying audience, but what about the other thing that would make them well-rounded performers, their ability to promo and work within the context of a serialized storyline?
That's where NWA Hollywood comes in. In the 47+ minutes of run-time of the episode I saw, there were several promo segments, like old-school, interview-style promo segments, a couple of beatdowns and one "paid for time" segment, all of which were well done with the exception of a beatdown segment where the annoucers were mute and didn't let me, a first time viewer, know that it was the Heritage Tag Champions Natural Selection beating up on a still unnamed team that I never got an ID on (and the only way I IDed the other team was that they appeared later on in the program to jump both Colt Cabana and Joey Ryan). It's almost like they're the RAW and PWG acts as their PPV slate, if, again, the PPV slate was somewhat unrelated to TV. It's a loose and probably disingenuous comparison at best, but at the same time, it paints a good picture of what the SoCal indie scene is like.
There are still some kinks they have to work out. The aforementioned gaffe with their beatdown segment was one thing. I think if that wasn't a production error and they meant to have no announcer description at all, they need to try and treat every show like they were getting a completely new audience every week in terms of the way they identify people. Secondly, they need to work on their lighting, as it was poor for the action on the outside of the ring and just okay for the action inside of it. However, the meat of the content was great, and the cast of characters - guys like Cabana, Ryan, Allison Danger, Johnny Goodtime, Austin Aries, Scorpio Sky and of course Percy Freakin' Pringle III - is solid. Beyond the shadow of any doubt, I really think you need to be watching NWA Hollywood. Just go to the website and watch the most recent episode or even watch some back episodes. If you're an old school wrestling fan like me, or if you're just tired of the same old BS "entertainment" format on both companies in the mainstream, this'll definitely do it for you.
Remember you can contact TH and ask him questions about wrestling, life or anything else. Please refer to this post for contact information. He always takes questions!
