The trap of the five-year rearview mirror
Every week, the archives get cracked open, and we pretend that five years ago was some golden age of booking. As Wade Keller and Jason Martin discussed looking back at the June 2021 landscape, we see a snapshot of a company struggling to find its footing post-pandemic. It is easy to romanticize segments like the Drew McIntyre and Bobby Lashley contract signing, but let’s be honest: that was peak "we have no idea how to fill three hours" television.
The cycle of nostalgia is a hell of a drug. We act like the chaotic booking of 2021—where Baszler was trapped in the purgatory of Alexa’s Playground—was somehow necessary for character growth. In reality, it was filler, pure and simple. If you go back to the WKPWP Raw post-show from early June 2021, you can smell the desperation during the Rhea Ripley and Charlotte Flair feud. It was a carousel of rematches that felt like they were printed on a loop.
The NXT pageant problem
Then we have the recent obsession with "fun" content. The latest PWT Talks NXT coverage featured a deep dive into the Mr. NXT pageant, which was, to put it mildly, a questionable use of airtime. While some find that kind of stuff endearing, it highlights a recurring issue in modern booking: the pivot toward comedy when the serious athletic narratives go flat. It feels less like a wrestling show and more like a high school variety hour.
Zaria winning her first championship is a massive milestone for her, but one has to wonder if the booking team actually has a plan for her beyond the initial pop. We see this all the time: a hot push followed by a cold shoulder once the novelty wears off. Wrestling creators love to lecture the audience on how they could learn from other entertainment, as John Keating once told Rich Fann back in 2021, but most of them forget the cardinal rule of any script: the audience needs a reason to care about the protagonist at minute 60, not just at the debut.
The Shawn Michaels standard
Looking back 30 years to May 1996, the discourse was different, but the stench of ego was exactly the same. When Shawn Michaels dropped that line about not dealing with married women during his Raw segment, it was treated as a "character moment." Thirty years later, we are still analyzing these throwaway lines as if they were Shakespearean soliloquies.
We are currently obsessed with efficiency—trying to pack meaningful matches into 72 minutes of podcast analysis—while forgetting that the actual matches often lack the gravity they had when we were kids. Nostalgia is essentially lying to your present self about your past expectations. We were just as bored with the mid-card thirty years ago as we are now; we just didn't have a podcast to vent about it for two hours the next day.
Ultimately, these archives exist to remind us that the struggle is constant. Whether it is the Inner Circle on Dynamite or a modern #1 contender’s match, the booking always balances on a knife's edge between brilliance and absolute garbage. The only difference is that today we get to watch the 2026 FIFA World Cup while we doomscroll through these recaps. Maybe next week the booking will actually land a clean finish that we don't have to debate for a decade.
