I'd like to begin this long overdue installment of The Shock Treatment by apologizing to my fellow columnists and loyal readers for the lack of new material since the holidays. My computer was begging to put out of its mercy so I passed it on to my parents and decided to go all out and buy myself a brand new lap top. Now I've had an opportunity to get everything straightened and am back behind the keyboard where I enjoy being. I also want to thank those of you who e-mailed me about my columns, or lack thereof, recently. Feedback is, as always, greatly appreciated so feel free to contact me at real.underground.baby@gmail.com. But that's enough about the uneventful past couple of months, let's move on to the present and possible future in this edition of The Shock Treatment!
In this column I'm going to take a look at the new MTV series, Wrestling Society X. It's been several months since talks of an astounding fifth weekly wrestling program initially began. When news broke and everyone heard that the "masterminds" at MTV would be responsible for this new television series expectations were low amongst wrestling fans all across the Internet. Details were sketchy at the time, and no one really knew what to expect when the program debuted earlier this year. Although many diehard fans were unhappy with the series premiere, the feedback was actually surprisingly good and the ratings showed it despite going head to head with the last half hour of WWE's fledgling ECW program. The footage was obviously heavily edited to remove any downtime from the matches and include only the action, which is understandable considering they only have thirty minutes of total air time. Wisely they chose several established stars with name value who weren't signed with WWE to appear on the premiere episode. The show was headlined by a battle royal to determine the top two contenders to compete for the WSX World Championship. The match featured Vampiro, Sean "X-Pac" Waltman, and former ECW stars New Jack and Justin Credible. In the end Vampiro and X Pac prevailed and both climbed ladders to retrieve contracts for a title match the following week.
In the following weeks Wrestling Society X returned to television screens in fans homes across the country. This time, the show seemed to focus more on the hottest young talent in the wrestling business rather than the previously established performers they opted for in the debut episode. Fans who tuned in saw wrestlers that they probably had never seen previously, doing things that they had probably never seen wrestlers do before. Matt "M-Dogg 20" Cross and Teddy Hart, who are arguably two of the most skilled athletes on the independent scene, have been featured predominantly on the show as a tag team and done some amazing things in the short time WSX has been on the air. Various other top talents from the countries independent wrestling scene including Matt Sydal, Jack Evans, and Scorpio Sky have been utilized in an attempt to draw in new viewers. Many of the same die hard fans who doubted the series were beginning to enjoy the quality of wrestling on the show despite the entire program seeming rushed due to the lack of TV time.
Ironically, Wrestling Society X's biggest advantage may very well end up being it's greatest detriment at the same time, MTV. The MTV network is a media phenomenon and is more than capable of making its newest series huge if marketed properly. Unfortunately, as successful as MTV has been over the past two decades they lack a common knowledge of the wrestling business. It's difficult to tell how much of a problem this will create because none of us are aware of the inner workings of WSX. Although musical performances by todays most popular artists such as Black Label Society, Sparta, and the award winning Three Six Mafia have done an excellent job of appealing to the core audience of MTV's viewers they must keep the hardcore wrestling fans in mind as well. Educated wrestling fans aren't impressed by pyro shooting out of caskets or fake jumper cables, they're impressed by exciting in-ring action provided by the likes of Matt Cross or The Human Tornado. MTV recently even went as far as to pull a recent episode of WSX off the air due to a controversial segment where IWA Puerto Rico star Ricky Banderas shot a fireball into the face of World Champion Vampiro. MTV claimed that the stunt was too easy to be imitated by children watching at home. Although on the surface they seem to have had good intentions, a strikingly similar scene was portrayed less than a month earlier on Spike TV's TNA Impact when Abyss and his manager James Mitchell lit a fireball into the face of Sting. Throwing a fireball into the face of an opponent is a nearly ancient practice in pro wrestling that dates back as far as the 1970's when it was frequently utilized by The Original Sheik. Besides, has anyone ever seen Jackass before? So much for the worries of portraying activities that children at home could harm themselves trying to imitate.
Another factor that could harm WSX's potential success is the lack of reliability amongst the youthful talent on its roster. Teddy Hart, for example, has a bad reputation of being arrogant and difficult to work with that's nearly as well-documented as his amazing skills. They also absolutely cannot underestimate the greed of Vincent K. McMahon, who is surely already aware of there presence due to the programs chosen timeslot. It should be noted that Vince's first appearance on the WWE owned ECW brand coincided with WSX's series premiere. The upstart organization seem to be taping an entire season over a short period of time and then airing it weekly on cable television. Would anyone really be shocked to see WWE, or TNA for that matter, attempt to entice popular WSX stars to jump ship to a more secure job with them during one of these "off-season" periods?
The last factor I would like to touch on is WSX's potential effect on pro wrestling entirely. Early last year WWE announced that they planned to relaunch Extreme Championship Wrestling as a third brand that featured programming on the Sci Fi channel. Even more recently, a matter of months ago Total Nonstop Action realized there dream of taking the companies flagship television show Impact to Spike's prime time lineup. These recent additions have already spread the market for pro wrestling thin, and now this new and experimental wrestling television series has done so even more. TNA stands to lose the most with the growing interest in WSX. For nearly five years TNA has struggled to keep there heads above the water, with the goal of becoming the alternative program to World Wrestling Entertainment in mind. Now this new alternative has burst onto the scene in a big way and stands poised to split the audience with an already struggling TNA. If neither manage to garner impressive enough ratings to please the networks that have invested in them, we could be growing closer and closer to having only one option when it comes to pro wrestling. Am I positive that's what is going to happen? Absolutely not. I've come to the grips with the fact that absolutely anything is possible in the wild world of wrestling, this is just one possibility that has crossed my mind. These aren't the facts, they're merely thoughts and ideas that I've blended together to form what I call the Shock Treatment.
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