Review of DN/GAN

A topic of great discussion now has greater fuel, and the move to a new beginning has taken its first step. Devil's Night/Great American Nightmare, the first interpromotional card of its kind, is on the air, and already it's causing some controversy.

You can read the controversy here.

Now again, I respect Pete and his opinion, but expect this post to be far less civil. Because I feel that a lot of the feedback coming from this event is wildly off base, because it's missing the point of what we were trying to accomplish with it. Did it have its shortcomings? Yes, and some were rather glaring. But in the end you can only gauge the success of a project based on your expectations going in, and from that perspective I view this event as a tremendous success.

As I posted the show late last night and have been in class since, I haven't had a chance to read through the entire show, so this won't be a segment by segment analysis. However, in assembling the show I did get a chance to look most of it over, and I've managed to get a good read on how it came out.

Now, a big criticism thus far (from multiple sources) is that the efforts of the two feds did not connect very well, making the whole event rather disjointed. My response is: what did you expect? Did you expect two feds of relative strangers, who have different styles and have never worked together before, to suddenly mesh together and create a totally fluid experience? I certainly did not, and I don't think the people involved did, either. The purpose of this event was A) to explore the logistics of creating such a show, and B) to bring people together for a fling at something totally new. This show was intended to blaze new ground and show the e-wrestling world that there's a reason to stay tuned, because the game is not sitting idle.

I was pleased with the five interfed matches that we booked and executed, but their true effect took place on a level an outside cannot fully appreciate. The purpose of this show, again, was to bring people together, and simply by virtue of having those matches we succeeded. I continued to work with Joe, Adam and Al got together, Andy and Kris worked a match, JJ and Darryl paired up, and John and Billy put on a great show. Granted, some of the actual matches didn't come out in perfect form. But how could they have? To expect greatness out of something that's never been done before is completely unfair.

Perfection and greatness is precisely what we're striving for. And I've got no doubt we'll get there eventually. But anyone who opened that show assuming that's what they were going to get, well, you deserve to be let down because you were fooling yourself.

I'm not writing this in defense of mediocrity, but rather in defense of the dozens of people who worked to make this show possible, and worked very hard. I agree that it was disjointed and did not have a great overall flow. But that is to be expected when throwing together two unique groups of people with minimal supervision and ask them to write a show. In that respect the people who should shoulder the blame most are myself and Lindz and Matt of PRIME for not fine-tuning things more. The honest truth is that, with another three days, we could have done a lot to tinker with the show and smooth out the wrinkles. But we have schedules to keep, and besides, the people involved had a good time doing it.

And in the end, isn't that the big picture truth? For the vast majority of people in GCW and PRIME, this show was downright fun, and I know that working with the PRIME roster was one of the most enjoyable and unique experiences of my career. You don't like our show? Well, that's fine, because we enjoyed making it.

But I digress.

Let's analyze the first goal, figuring out how to structurally create such a thing. This entails the very basics of the event, including how to get everything into two backstage scripts, how to sort everything out and combine two feds' shows into one. This is not something that has precedent, not something that we can turn to a wise old man and ask for guidance on. And frankly, the sheer chaos that emerges from having to concoct such a system on the fly caused some issues. In retrospect, we probably should have hammered out the details and gone over them with the rosters weeks in advance. But now we've learned.

The second goal was bringing people together, and in large part we did. There were some people on both sides who still disliked the very concept of working an interpromotional show, but the entire event was structured such that anyone who didn't want to participate in the interfed portion didn't have to. Some criticized the decision to only have a handful of interfed matches, but internally this allowed us to include everyone and leave the option there for people who wanted to cross borders. And quite a few people answered the call. What you can't tell judging from this show is that people who weren't necessarily in competition came out of their own little niches to speak to others, and we succeeded in building a bridge that did not exist before. The contrast in styles made things look ugly and there were a lot of glaring omissions, but now we know that we need at least a day after everything's in to read through and smooth it out and add the necessary content. But now we've learned.

To be quite honest, the actual, physical show itself is only a small portion of this entire project. There are so many more intangible aspects to this event that can't be seen from reading it, and only time will reveal them to the rest of the community.

Again, the criticisms of the show itself are well deserved. The confusion inherent to such a new venture caused two shows that likely would have been great independently to end up less than stellar. It was disjointed and much of what one would expect from such an event was missing, and in that respect the event itself certainly fails to live up to one's expectations.

But when you consider all the steps that went into making this show a reality, what happened at DN/GAN was really very impressive to me. You had two rosters of twenty-something people coming together, taking initiative and working together for the first time. Is that in itself not worthy of applause?

While I've lamented the fact that Lindz, Matt and myself perhaps weren't as hands-on as we should have been, this does exhibit perhaps the greatest triumph of the show. The fact that we didn't NEED to micromanage the whole event, the fact that we didn't NEED to spell things out to everyone is an amazing thing. The fact that both rosters were able to step up and open the lines of communication for themselves, to answer the call and throw themselves into such a project is a great sign for the future. And though there are still some valid criticisms coming from some people internally that wanted things done differently, that's the whole bloody point; we're learning, and GCW and PRIME were fully willing to take the extra time and effort to do something totally unique.

This show marks a great new moment in e-wrestling history, and I'm extremely pleased about that. With regards to our structural and interpromotional goals, Devil's Night/Great American Nightmare was a runaway success. Consider how bad it could have been: members of both feds could have argued their stylistic differences and driven the show into the ground; a majority of both rosters could have ignored the presence of the other altogether, refusing to bridge the gap; the show could have taken weeks to assemble with two feds trying to connect two sets of writers. There are a million ways in which this show could have utterly failed, but none of them happened. The rosters stepped up and have announced to the community that they believe in this project and are willing to do what it takes to make it work. I call that a success.

So yeah, I agree that the show fell far short of its full potential. With the sheer talent in both feds the potential for greatness is high, and I understand someone wanting that from such a show. But the PTC interfed is dead, leaving the feds to fend for themselves, and what this represents is a world in which an interfed is not needed to create unity between feds. GCW and PRIME, for one night, came together as one with hardly any pushing needed.

What's more, we've all learned some great lessons from this experience. We know now how to improve for next time, and the next show will be better. Will the next one be perfect? I certainly don't expect it to be. But it will be better, because we can take the wealth of knowledge earned from having blazed this trail and apply it to the future. The unknowns were many and the potential for failure was great, but everything came together and worked. What the show lacks in quality it more than makes up for in sheer gumption.

I understand that a good portion of the community at large might not be able to appreciate the event as it stands, because the true success of this show was on a very personal level. But I would like to personally thank each and every person that wrote even a single word for this event, that opened up their mind to a new experience and stood up and introduced themselves to a new group of people. I am so pleased to have had this experience with PRIME. I am looking forward to having the same experience with FUSE.

Frankly, had this show been perfect right off the bat, I'd have been disappointed, because nothing worth doing should be that easy. If we really want to innovate, if we truly want to push this game forward, that means taking on difficult challenges and taking our lumps as we go. The fact that there is so much more to do, that there is so much more to learn and so much potential for the future tells me that these interfed shows are worth doing, and will provide a great amount of excitement for the future.

So hate the show if you want to, I won't really blame you. But what you simply cannot hate is this show's contribution to the e-wrestling community, because this event was a very good thing.