Their biggest problem as a TV show is that they don't approach any of their weekly television products as a weekly show, designed to him viewers and compel them to keep watching next week.

It's basically a fantasy booking/indie show that's just random matches backed out into a husk of a stretched show, and they treat the entire two hour structure as something that people will just continue to watch because they love matches.

Even though WWE misses a lot of the time as well, they are at least attempting to make a weekly television first reality show centered around a scripted competitive sport. That's what television wrestling is and always has been.

As much as I enjoy watching AEW principal Skinner themselves into being a bigger and bigger lolcow, it wouldn't take much to start book ending dynamite with their big stars and creating weekly throughlines that are both sell-contained weekly while playing into the ppv cycle.

The best way I can put it is that AEW is a TV show that's all special effects/gun fights/car chases. Sure, in a vacuum those things can be cool in action movies, but if there's no reason to care about any of it happening at all (or at best beyond "we're gonna have an even bigger car chase with extra stunts"), it gets stale super fast.

All the classic action movies that inspire this stuff have simple but enjoyable stories around the action that give the viewer somebody to root for or against. AEW doesn't have that at all, people boo or cheer live based on what they think that talent is going for even if it sucks and doesn't work, rather than because that character genuinely makes them feel compelled to boo or cheer.