The New Golden Age of Pro Wrestling Is Here

It's the best storytelling on TV

I’ve been a wrestling fan my entire life. I can’t recall which was first, but I was either introduced by my father when he made me watch one of his own childhood heroes, Bruno Sammartino, towards the end of his career, or by my grandfather on my mother’s side. He used to go to wrestling events back in the days of Lou Thesz and Gorgeous George but caught wind of what the then-nascent WWF was doing in the early-1980s and let me watch with him and I was hooked from about WrestleMania 2 in 1986 on. I’ve been to at least a hundred live events, from WrestleMania to two SummerSlams, WCW, ECW, and dozens of indie, and sometimes illegal promotions in warehouses, gymnasiums, backyards, and one in the middle of a horse farm just south of Chicago. I used to buy and trade tapes of matches from all over the world, read magazines and newsletters, and I once let two amateur wrestlers perform a 3D through a table because I was 18 they swore it wouldn’t hurt. They lied. That’s all to say I feel comfortable saying that if there was ever a perfect time to get into wrestling, right now is it. Time will tell if we’re currently at the start or in the middle of a golden age for it, but it’s certainly smarter than ever.

There are a few reasons wrestling is so good right now, but the two biggest ones have to do with the behemoth World Wrestling Entertainment. For the last few decades, WWE (formerly WWF) was the only game in town on a national level. There was lots of great indie stuff happening, and TNA had a decent run in the aughts but then seemed to morph into a sadder version of the WCW right before Vince McMahon bought his competition in 2001. Besdies that, there wasn’t anything that competed with McMahon’s WWE. In 2019, that changed when Tony Khan launched All Elite Wrestling. What Khan had that other fledgling promotions didn’t was experience working in both the NFL and Premiere League, as well as billions of dollars at his disposal, all thanks to his father Shahid Khan. Khan decided to put his nepo baby status to good use and the promotion might not be as big as WWE in terms of media exposure or ticket sales (yet), but they’ve done a great job presenting actual wrestling. Every show has at least one fantastic match and not much filler to go along with it, and the young talent that has been able to thrive in AEW is often what makes watching the promotion’s weekly TBS show worth tuning in for. Last year I profiled the wrestler I think is the best thing to happen to the sport (yes, I’m calling it a sport) in years, maybe decades, Maxwell Jacob Friedman. Friedman recently came back after some time off to recover from injuries, and he resorted back to his dastardly heel ways. He’s always entertaining, but when he plays the bad guy, nobody can top him right now. On the woman’s side of the roster, there’s been “Timeless” Toni Storm, whose cracked Golden Age of Hollywood actress gimmick gets better each week, gloriously makes no sense. Wrestling is camp, and some wrestlers understood that better than other. Storm certinally does. She’s cut from the same cloth as legendary dandies like Georgous George and Goldust, but mixed with Norma Desmond. And she’s not like one of those awful old Vince McMahon “wrestler with a job” gimmicks, either; Storm’s evolution is she just snapped. One day she just started talking about working with film directors who have been dead for decades or orgies she attended in the Garden of Allah or working with, her promos were suddenly always in black and white, and each was more hilariously unhinged than the last.

Like I said, Storm’s whole move towards the “Timeless” persona felt very un-Vince McMahon. Even in the ‘80s and ‘90s, WCW and anybody else who thought they could compete with WWE felt the need to copy a lot of what McMahon’s company was doing, but McMahon’s influence on wrestling is thankfully finally going away. Even before the allegations of sexual abuse by the now-former CEO came to light, fans had been grumbling for years about how McMahon’s need to control every little thing, and how every moment and thing said on the air had to pass by him first was ruining WWE. Now, with McMahon finally gone and control of the programing in the hands of his son-in-law and retired wrestling great Paul “Triple H” Levesque, there is a noticable difference in the way WWE shows look, feel, even sound. The characters are given more room to develop, and Levesque has the good sense to understand that the internet and “mark” culture means any veil that may have existed between what the fans see and what they’re told is “real” is almost totally gone. Wrestling isn’t fake—just run up against the ropes in a ring once and see how much that supposedly simple act hurts. But most of what you see on a show isn’t real in the sense that the hostilities or stories presented might be fictional or embellished. It took the WWE a bit to figure out how to keep it feeling real, but they’re really hit on something in the last six months. It started with the buildup to WrestleMania when the company surprised and angered fans by announcing that legendary wrestler and box-office king Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson would headline the yearly event against his (real life) family member Roman Reigns instead of fan-favorite babyface Cody Rhodes taking on Reigns in a rematch for the title. I don’t know what goes on behind the curtain at the WWE, but I got the feeling the weren’t ready for the fans to turn on Johnson, one of the most beloved wrestlers ever. The way they worked it, letting Johnson lean hard into the heel personal that made him famous in the first place, was brilliant. That was smart, but another recent storyline is downright brilliant. It’s my current must-see TV: Bo Dallas/Uncle Howdy and the Wyatt Sicks.

When he isn’t wrestling, Dallas is Taylor Rotunda. His grandfather, father and uncles were all wrestling greats, but it was his brother, Windham Rotunda, who was single-handedly changing wrestling with some of the most intense, sometimes horrifying, work of the last decade. First, he was Bray Wyatt, the leader of the Wyatt Family cult, but his character evolved and morphed a few times before the company released him in 2021. Along with countless other fans, I was shocked by the release, and found myself checking in week in and week out when it was announced that he’d been resigned. His brief return was exciting; it also introduced the Uncle Howdy character played by Dallas. The pair looked set to launch another wild storyline, but then Windham Rotunda/Bray Wyatt passed away from a heart attack at the age of 36 after a bout of Covid exacerbated a pre-exsisting heart condition. Personally, as somebody who has watched wrestling his entire life and who has seen a number of favorites die, often far too early, I’d say Wyatt’s passing affected me as much as the deaths of Owen Heart and Eddie Guerro in 1999 and 2005, respectively. Everything Bray Wyatt did was fascinating to me. He knew cinema as well as he did wrestling, even basing his early cult leader persona partially on Robert De Niro’s Max Cady from Cape Fear (as well as another lesser-known wrestler who I personally loved, Waylon Mercy), and later morphing into full-on horror mode as The Fiend.

Rotunda’s 2023 death could have signaled the end of the whole Wyatt storyline, but his brother and WWE creative obviously had different plans. And over the last few weeks and months, the company started teasing some sort of return of Uncle Howdy before he finally showed up with a whole new “family” in tow. Fans were skeptical; it’s easy to understand considering some of the downright awful stunts the WWE tried while McMahon was at the helm. But instead of presenting fans with the new version of Uncle Howdy leading a “family,” and making it all corny supernatural or a sad rip-off of what Bray Wyatt did, they’ve turned it into this really fascinating, albeit creepy, meditation on grief and loneliness. Even though Bo Dallas/Uncle Howdy or the other members of his stable haven’t wrestled a match yet, the company has used the buildup to get in front of any notions that this is an attempt to cash in or rework a popular gimick. Instead, weekly vingnettes have featured Bo Dallas and Uncle Howdy in conversation (just watch to understand), as well as this last week’s video where former-Wyatt Family and current Wyatt Sicks member Erick Rowan talk in heartbreaking detail about losing not just Windham Rotunda, but also the other founding member of the Wyatt Family, Luke Harper (aka Brodie Lee, real name Jonathan Huber), who passed away from a rare lung condition in 2020. When he says in the video, “I fell down a well, I couldn’t get out,” it’s real. The whole video, with all its Eli Roth torture porn look and feel (sans any torture or porn, natch) is gutting. And for the last few weeks, I’ve been at the edge of my seat to see what they’re going to do next.

Wrestling is a funny thing because its popularity rises and falls all the time. I grew up in the 1980s, when Hulk Hogan and other WWF stars were legit global superstars. In the late-1990s, during the “Monday Night Wars” era when WWE had “Stone Cold” Steve Austin and The Rock and WCW had the NWO, I had to decide in my teenage brain which one I was more interested in week in and week out. Both of those eras brought in plenty of new fans, people who either just watched during those times and eventually lost interest, or people like me who became lifelong fans for reasons I honestly can’t understand to this day, personally speaking. But right now, what I’ve been seeing in professional wrestling is different. It’s taking on more nuance and changing with the times. It’s still a lot of sweaty men in tights and there’s always the inevitable outcomes like one wrestler will cheat after the referee gets knocked out, but that’s part of the fun. Wrestling is still wrestling, but I can honestly say after nearly 40 years of watching, what I’m seeing is an elevated version of something that had stayed mostly the same for the last 20 or so years. If you’re ever going to get into it, now might be the time. At the very least, it’s a good way to get your mind off…everything else.