Well, The Final Deletion has completed. Last night's Impact Wrestling saw "Broken" Matt Hardy attempt to delete brother Nero from existence had quite the cinematic encounter. Fireworks, drones, holograms and gasoline made this much more than their contract signing a few weeks ago. Many people have their opinion on whether it's just bad or whether it's so bad it's good. And honestly I'm in the second camp.
For months I've been saying that TNA needed to do something outside of the ordinary to get people to watch. No matter what wrestling you put on that show a lot of people don't watch it. The audience feels burned by the backstage going on behind the scenes of the embattled company many don't feel like they need to invest two hours of their time. Add to the fact that the show is taped and there's even less incentive for most wrestling fans to even care.
That's why I think this really caught fire is because it was something different from the norm. Don't get me wrong, TNA has done she the vignettes before but this was something way out of the ordinary. Say what you want to about Matt Hardy but he understand the Internet better than any other person in this industry. This thing was a viral phenomenon and had more people talking about Impact Wrestling then ever have before.
Was It cheesy? Sure. But more people wanted to see this than any other thing in the recent history of TNA Wrestling. If the company is smart we will see more of these kind of segments happen outside of The Impact Zone to get more people to tune in for the special events. What could the events be you may ask?. I'm not really sure to be honest. But if you can make something that is spoiler proof more people are willing to check out what's going on. You have four weeks in between tapings why not try something out of the ordinary to get some positive press for once.
WWE has seemingly taking a couple pages of this playbook. In regards to this week's Smackdown, it was announced this past Monday that Brock Lesnar's opponent would be revealed for SummerSlam. However, no live announcement was made at the taping in Toledo. Vince and company want fans to tune in to the broadcast to see the announcement. Add this to The Wyatt Family invitation to the New Day to visit their compound and it seems like WWE is trying to figure out how to make more interesting viral programming seeing the success of Brother Nero.
But if last night's Impact Wrestling is any indication I think the presentation was hampered by actually having a match shot in that same style. For some reason it didn't connect with me as much as I thought it would. It was a lot of fun but seeing them do wrestling moves actually hampered the strands in my opinion. Obviously you should use over theatrics in sparing doses but it definitely made for an interesting book end an episode. Hopefully this gives Impact Wrestling a good lead into next week's live to tape episode. The more surprises you can give the audience the better.
I imagine TNA will try and copy the success over and over again now as they've done in the past. But I think this has just been lightning in a bottle just for the mere craziness and creativity of the brothers Hardy. I may be wrong and I hope I am but this may be where Brother Nero built up something special that can't be duplicated. We shall see what's next for Impact Wrestling soon.