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| The Bucks aren't good actors enough to pull off waffling every week |
The Young Bucks are not even Owen and Luke Wilson let alone Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt. They're an exciting and innovative tag team in the ring, and outside of it, they've always been best being snot-nosed little pricks getting under people's skins. While you can (and should) argue that they've been on point on the former reputation so far in All Elite Wrestling's history, the latter has seen them take on several ill-fitting roles, sometimes simultaneously. First, they were elder statesmen for the division, attempting to put over Private Party and Proud and Powerful as bedrocks for a burgeoning tag team slate that they clearly wanted to make the best in the world. The problem with that role was the Bucks were not established enough for a mainstream American audience to be able to do that effectively. However, putting other guys over from a position of power is easily forgivable. The fact that neither Private Party nor Proud and Powerful got any sort of follow-up feud to showcase their newfound rub from beating the Bucks is less forgivable though, but AEW's booking is fodder for a whole other post.
They seemed to go from that role into a constant stream of waffling, where they would tease embracing full roles as antagonists, a role which they, as mentioned above, fill excellently, but then somehow have a story beat drop where they would be pulled back into some lukewarm babyface role. They would harangue Hangman Page one week for trying his best but failing because he liked whiskey and then superkicking Alex Marvez just for asking questions about it to allowing themselves to be hit in a vulnerable area to gas up FTR as big bads the next. Most recently, the waffling has been excruciating as they've asked fans to question whether they were about to join Kenny Omega's revamped American Bullet Club all while being super-worried about them having to deal with the Inner Circle attacking their father.
In a vacuum, the plot twist that the Young Bucks going from not being able to do their signature moves to Omega in a match where teammate Jon Moxley was counting on them to finish the job to actively turning on Moxley moments later should have been an effective plot twist. The reason why it fell flat for me and so many other observers is that they already did a dry run on that when the Good Brothers initially appeared in AEW, which was at the advent of Chris Jericho and MJF attacking the Bucks' dad. This "will they or won't they" with regards to Omega has really only been going on for two months tops, and yet it has felt like an eternity. Part of it is because these angles rarely work on regular television shows with good actors and seasoned writers.
The Bucks have two speeds they do with any degree of competence. The prick heel, arch-Bullet Club personae are the best ones, and they can kinda pull off the whitemeat babyface character in a vacuum. AEW is not a vacuum, and they are long past being able to be fresh-faced youngsters for that kind of character to feel authentic anywhere but in WWE, where they would bring the average age of the roster down by a couple of months. Matt Jackson, in specific, often tries to run this beleaguered, fire-tempered emotional avatar, and he's never really pulled it off with any aplomb. Look at the Golden Lovers vs. Young Bucks match from New Japan a few years ago, which is where a lot of this current angle borrows beats. That was the first time Matt played the role of the personally aggrieved party. The main thrust of his emotional range was making facial expressions that told the audience he had to take a shit when he was angry at Omega and Kota Ibushi and facial expressions that told the audience he couldn't hold his poop in any longer when he looked conflicted. In the years since that match, those chops have not improved one bit.
One should expect that the story should take off from here, that the Bucks are now fully Bullet Club for life, and the set-up for the eventual Kenny Omega Bullet Club vs. Adam Page Dark Order hot war will be the endgame. Given that they've already pulled back from the ledge on that once, mildly albeit, gives me pause that that's the direction, that this alliance may only be strong for when the Bucks help Omega send Moxley into the sunset of paternity leave. I won't pretend I know AEW's plans though, so either one could be on the table. The main point I'm trying to make is that what should've been a watershed moment in Dynamite history was instead watered down because the Bucks thought too highly of their ability to tell a story that more resembled prestige television than weekly wrestling on cable.
I have been on the "wrestling is art" longer in the last 15 years than I've not been, but I have to admit that I'm wrong on that front. It's not that wrestling can't be art. I think the potential is there. However, as it's situated right now, you're not getting what can even reach the levels of the kind of propagandizing pap or patronizing, lowest common denominator-attempts at comedy that you find on CBS in a wrestling show because the rosters around the world are not equipped for that kind of storytelling. It takes a lot of understanding on theater and literary tropes to be able to supplement the story inside the ring with something outside that would be worthy of being put on a show like Mad Men or whatever. That's not even to start with how these wrestlers, who are already programmed either to get their shit in if they're newer school in thought or to go down well-beaten paths of popping crowds if they're older school. And that's before you even get into the promoters, who don't know how to make art for art's sake. They know how to make a buck though. Profit motivation and art creation rarely if ever are in alignment.
Furthermore, the idea of creating art for art's sake has a lot of inertia to overcome thanks to the reputation wrestling has accrued over the years due to Vince McMahon's domination of the business. I don't say it lightly that he has ghettoized the business from the point where newspapers favorably covered it alongside sport and entertainment to the point where its comeback into respectable media has only been bolstered through media partnerships and through independent bloggers throwing off the shackles of shame for liking it and covering it for their outlets, reputation be damned. While that reputation is improving, it's telling that AEW only is on TNT because someone within the network wanted wrestling on their airwaves, not because there was some latent demand to have it on as many channels as possible.
So the question becomes "can any wrestling company, let alone a mainstream one, survive trying to make good television instead of just good wrestling?" I think the answer is no, clearly and emphatically. I hate saying this because I think that shooting for the moon and landing among the stars isn't necessarily the worst practice. However, in this case, the Young Bucks are trying to shoot for the moon with a SpaceX rocket, and their destiny is to be incinerated on the launchpad. You have to know your limitations and tell the best story for the people who come to your shows (when big crowds are allowed back at arenas) and watch you on television. It would be nice to have wrestling be more than it is now, but you gotta have the personnel to pull it off. Otherwise, you're a football team trying to run a West Coast offense with an inaccurate quarterback and receivers who trip over their own feet running routes more complex than a vert.
