​Professional wrestling is a lot of things: Live action stunt show. Theater in the round wearing sporting event as a costume. Quasi-imaginary fighting league, presented on television like Sports Night as written and performed by the cast of American Gladiators.

It runs on Kayfabe, the parallel dimension in which all wrestling exists and the narrative energy source by which all wrestling is fueled. This semi-permeable universe, protected by a membrane of metafictionality, is why most (adult) fans laugh when people ask If They Know It's Fake. Professional wrestling is bullshit, sure, but it's our bullshit and it's designed to make us feel true things.

Those things can be the joy that comes from seeing Xavier Woods play "Taps" on a trombone as Big E pins another opponent to end a match, then join him in the ring to do the Whip and Nae Nae with their New Day stablemate Kofi Kingston. Or the thrill of watching Brock Lesnar, Human Wrecking Ball, literally rip the door off of a Cadillac and throw it 50 feet after destroying the car with axes.

MORE THAN JUST SPANDEX-CLAD MEN Pretending to fight

How It Works

Professional wrestling operates like a never-ending version of Comedy Bang! Bang! turned physical: Nigh-unlimited permutations of stock characters forever improvising with or against one another, trying to remain obvious enough about what they're doing that no one loses faith in where things are going (all while balancing on a web of tropes in the time allotted for each segment).

Matches and their accompanying storylines are developed by head writers/bookers/booking committees deciding who will be partnered with whom in a match/program, as well as the winner and the finish on a given night that either completes a given narrative thread or splits it off into several different potential directions going forward.

Professional wrestling is bullshit, sure, but it's our bullshit and it's designed to make us feel true things.

And while there's no "wrong" way to watch a show , a willingness to accept that any sense of direct control is an illusion obscuring a quasi-predictable car crash whose inevitabilities can only be changed through collective action instead of deciding everything is the Best or the Worst is highly recommended. Understanding that the joy and the journey are the destination also helps as unreasonable expectations and assumptions of disappointment based on a limited grasp of storytelling conventions can (shockingly) lead to disappointment. Especially when things don't turn out exactly the way you planned (or, in wrestling parlance, "fantasy booked") them in your head.

Like coming to appreciate the lack of control, awareness of the hierarchy regarding the way and pace at which these stories are told helps tremendously. Televised promotions (usually) produce weekly shows – for WWE, it's Monday's Raw and Thursday's Smackdown! on cable, along with Main Event and Superstars on the WWE Network/Hulu – building towards monthly PPVs (like September's Night of Champions). These, in turn, usually build towards bigger flagship shows in a company's PPV armada, such as WrestleMania for the WWE or Wrestle Kingdom for New Japan Pro Wrestling which serve as showcases not just for their companies but the medium as a whole.

Understanding if you want to see resolution you'll need to pay for the privilege can also help temper expectations. Much in the same way that understanding that while some interesting shit might happen in Justice League: Darkseid War #3 (of 4), the real fireworks/Omega beaming aren't going to happen until they buy that final issue, appreciating that wrestling companies make their money on the upsell helps the bitter pill of capitalism go down smoother.



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SHOULD YOU BE A JOHN CENA FAN?

Who To Watch

In the world of professional wrestling, the WWE is the NBA: a super league whose star power and global reach make it the biggest game in town even if the sheer volume of other quality organizations around the world prevent them from being the only name worth mentioning.

However, the performers working for them are likely the only ones you've ever heard of if you're not directly engaged in the "universe" of professional wrestling fandom. Along with highly decorated stalwarts like John Cena and Randy Orton , the WWE also bring in nostalgia acts like WCW's Sting and continue to trot out stars of years past like The Rock and Chris Jericho when they need to goose ratings or feed the nostalgia trolls.

The lead antagonists – even if they are largely Heels in Name Only – are the highly underrated HHH and the incandescently brilliant Stephanie McMahon, who is rivaled only by her father Vince and Brock Lesnar's longtime agent Paul Heyman as the best "non-playable character" since Bobby Heenan left in 1993.

In the world of professional wrestling, the WWE is the NBA: a super league whose star power and global reach make it the biggest game in town

A litany of young stars in the company have begun to make their names, with performers like Seth Rollins, Roman Reigns, Dean Ambrose, Kevin Owens, Bray Wyatt, Luke Harper, Finn Balor, Sami Zayn, Cesaro, Neville (The Man That Gravity Forgot), Paige, Charlotte Flair, Becky Lynch, "The Boss" Sasha Banks, Bayley and the aforementioned Big E working their way up the card and into our hearts and minds. The young women on that list have been doing the Lord's work for much of the last year and are now in the midst of a "revolution," which essentially means "they put on good to great matches where performers actually work instead engaging in hair-pulling clusterkerfuffles".

Nearly every person mentioned in the previous paragraph made their way through WWE's current development program, NXT, with the only exception being "The Swiss Superman" Cesaro . As such, NXT has quickly become WWE proper's biggest American rival for the hearts and minds of wrestling fans. It has provided a place for new WWE recruits to learn the company's best practices and for so-called smart fans to enjoy a product more directly geared towards them — the 30 Rock to Raw's SNL.

There are also minor league operations where — along with larger but still decidedly second tier companies such as Ring of Honor and TNA (Total Nonstop Action)/Impact Wrestling — a not insignificant number of those who eventually find their way to the WWE made their names. Outside of America, companies like Mexico's AAA and CMLL, along with the aforementioned New Japan Pro Wrestling , are the major brands in their respective countries and significantly eclipse the WWE's popularity in those regions.



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WRESTLING WITH THE CANON

What You Should Watch

WWE and New Japan (heads up: everything is written in Japanese) as well as smaller and more experimental outfits like CHIKARA have made their archives available to anyone willing to pay, with some even capable of streaming live PPVs. And, while it hasn't happened yet, the narrative-heavy-and-entirely-constructed-as-a-TV-show style of cult hit Lucha Underground may be the next stage of wrestling's artistic evolution if binge-watching services like Netflix or Amazon throw their hats in the ring.

Which makes sense, as wrestling's level of content production is tailor made for on-demand culture. Entire series of television are generated by a single performer over the course of a given year, with most of their storylines punctuated periodically by single episode-long bits of action that are themselves then cobbled together as part of epic, movie-length shows. It's also a self-sustaining system on some level, with all of this data/footage pared down into magical movie trailers of awesomeness that make you want to pay more money to watch these same people pretend to fight each other the next month.

It can, of course, be a little overwhelming, with so much to see and so little direction as to what to watch. So, while this following list is in no way definitive, it should provide at least a little bit of clarity as to the very basic parts of how this whole sports entertainment enterprise works and what makes it so glorious:

Everything Is Wrestling

While your mileage may vary on certain bits of this, it's a fairly even-handed look – and a radical reinterpretation – of the intrinsic silliness/majesty of professional wrestling as a storytelling device. Also, enough cameos to make Entourage look like a reserved exploitation of its executive producer's rolodex.

The 'Cure For The Common Show'

In this video, Vince McMahon doesn't so much break the fourth wall as burn it at the stake for crimes against humanity. This segment essentially "allowed" the company to treat what they were doing not as a place where a series of happy accidents created compelling stories but where nearly everything that happened had a purpose and even that which didn't could eventually be given meaning. And legally, it helped get state athletic commissions off their backs.

'The Most Illegal Thing I've Ever Seen In The History of Wrestling'

In this video, The Osirian Portal — a tag team with an ancient Egyptian gimmick — uses mass hypnosis to make everyone get, for lack of a better term, funky. Which is to say, dem kids get after it. There's break dancing, mass hypnosis and even a tiny cardboard box stage. It is, essentially, all that professional wrestling/life should/can ever be, all at once.

That Dropkick, Though

On the complete opposite end of that spectrum is New Japan's Kazuchika Okada performing art in motion with the most beautiful dropkick ever recorded on film. Which is to say, while the storylines and metafictional elements of the show can be fascinating meditations on the nature of truth and falsity in the extramoral sense, sometimes you just want to see someone get kicked in the face via levitation.

The Power Of Positivity

In a nearly decade long, highly decorated career, the fact that Kofi Kingston's greatest moment is saying with a straight face "The Dudleys don't respect furniture. They have no regard for furniture," is why sports entertainment is God's gift to both sports and entertainment. That and the gong-assisted 2 Live Crew cover.

A WELL-ROUNDED WRESTLING MEDIA DIET

Who To Follow And What To Read

The great Marc Normandin helped out a great deal in compiling this list, which starts with the grand poobahs of internet wrestling writing: David "Davis" Shoemaker (AKA the Masked Man) and David "Dave" Meltzer. The former has created a place at Grantland for professional wrestling to be treated as a real fake thing, capable of being dissected and reviewed just the same as any other piece of pop art. The latter is a demi-god whose website/insider newspaper, The Wrestling Observer Newsletter, is considered the gold standard in honest wrestling related gossip. Which, for a world where the largest statues are built for the best liars, is quite a feat.

There's also Bill Hanstock at SB Nation, who provides perhaps the most moderate view of modern professional wrestling you'll find on the internet. He appreciates everything without blindly accepting anything that's fed to him. Along these same lines is Danielle Matheson, whose work on With Spandex lifts up the quality of an industry in desperate need of diverse, and perhaps more importantly, strong and resonant voices.

And finally, there's New Day's Big E whose Twitter game is so strong it makes me wonder how many characters he can bench at once.

As for extracurricular materials, it's mostly books, like Shoemaker's The Squared Circle, The Death of WCW by Meltzer's business partner Bryan Alvarez and WrestleCrap's RD Reynolds and Hitman, written by professional wrestling's Peyton Manning, Bret Hart, and perhaps the only genuinely essential wrestling autobiography (of which there are just a silly amount of "non-essential" cannon/bookshelf fodder.)

However, if you ever have the time to sit down and read some high quality long-form, it's hard to do better than Tom Breihan's look at the year CHIKARA disappeared into internet before reappearing in a cornfield.

It's about as real as fake can get.