Against All Odds: the Forgotten PPV

This is the blog where I normally do my monthly preview of TNA's latest PPV offering, where I run down the card and give my thoughts on who should go over in each match and why. I'm not going to do that this month and there's a very simple reason for it.

I don't care about Against All Odds. TNA has given me absolutely no reason to care about it.

I'll be the first to say that TNA's typical PPV build up is extremely hit and miss at the best of times, but this month it was as if they just flat out didn't give a rat's ass. Some of this was by design, I suppose. TNA just decided that the February 3rd iMPACT was the highest priority and focused all their attention on that show. To their credit, it payed off in the ratings as they scored one of their highest viewerships ever on a Thursday night. I hope it was worth it because this came at the cost of sacrificing nearly all the hype for this Sunday's PPV, resulting in a show that has virtually no buzz, no intrigue and, unless I'm very much mistaken, will most likely draw a pretty miserable buyrate.

Hell, even now that February 3rd has come and gone, it seems like the writers are focusing more on hyping the March 3rd iMPACT than anything else. The problem is that Against All Odds is the show they want the fans to pay money for.

Not gonna happen, TNA. Sorry.

Maybe if they had made more of an effort to get me interested in Against All Odds I would be, but they didn't. And in this day and age when iMPACT is routinely portrayed as being more important than the PPVs anyway, it's already like swimming against the tides to work up enough interest to even consider shelling out my hard earned money to order these things. Now TNA want me to order it when they've done nothing to make this PPV look or feel important?

It doesn't work that way. Against All Odds is obviously a throwaway show. That's how I view it and I suspect a lot of other fans feel that way too.

But even if that weren't the case, I still wouldn't be very excited for this show on the basis of such an uninspired card. I couldn't care less about Bully Ray vs. Brother Devon. Not only do I have no idea why Samoa Joe and the Pope are feuding, I still have no damn clue why the Pope even turned heel in the first place. The X-division match is between 3 heels, 2 of whom are a tag team, the other of whom is a painfully mediocre wrestler with a cartoon character gimmick that I have no desire to see on my television ever again. Rob Van Dam vs. Matt Hardy is a feud that has been nearly forgotten about in recent weeks. Jeff Hardy vs. Ken Anderson was made a ladder match on the go home show for no discernible reason without being properly hyped or built up at all. The 6-man tag involving Gunner, Murphy, Rob Terry and Scott Steiner will most likely be so horrendously awful that it will reach levels of sucktitude far too numerous to count.

The only match on the card that has had a lot of steady, consistent build up is Kurt Angle vs. Jeff Jarret, a feud I can't stand. I'm flabbergasted that TNA has wasted so much of Kurt Angle's time feuding with the Jarrets, and the fact that these people are now exploiting their children (the product of the same failed marriage that spawned this interminable program) just to further this angle puts a really bad taste in my mouth.

Normally, my PPV Preview blog is one that I spend a lot of time on because I like to give my thoughts on each match in detail. This month I just don't feel like doing that because TNA has failed to make me care enough.

But perhaps there is a silver lining here. We've heard for ages that Dixie Carter isn't a fan of TNA's PPV format and the idea was being tossed around to eliminate several of them. Right now that sounds like a pretty good idea to me. TNA's PPV hype never seems to be particularly strong and we're constantly hearing about how low their buyrates are, but they managed to successfully hype up and create enough interest in the February 3rd show to draw a great rating, well above what they usually get. Maybe by eliminating some PPVs and putting more focus on hyping up specific episodes of iMPACT like the February 3rd show, they can grow their audience more quickly.

Clearly, the TV show is more important to them than their PPVs are, so why not get rid of some of them? After all, if they continue to build them up in such a half-assed manner, no one's going to buy them anyway.