Chris Jericho has recalled what led to All Elite Wrestling obtaining its original television deal, citing which two legendary figures were responsible!
Excitement was rife throughout 2019 when All Elite Wrestling first launched. Later announced to be airing its weekly show, Dynamite, on TNT in North America, it felt like an exciting time to be a wrestling fan – and it certainly was.
Chris Jericho, who has been with the Tony Khan-helmed promotion since day one, has opened up on AEW receiving its first TV deal and how important that was. Speaking during an Inside The Ropes live show via Talk Is Jericho, ‘The Wizard’ cited how important he believes both Jim Ross and himself were in making the deal happen:
“Well, I think once again, I mean, I remember the original television deal. Now it seems like a million years ago, especially I know in the UK, we have a great time slot. We actually do better than Raw a lot of weeks on ITV, if that’s the network, I think it is. But at the time, there was no television deal. And I remember at some point, we were talking about maybe going on Showtime. At some point we’re thinking maybe streaming it on, I don’t know, Amazon Prime or something along those lines, and it’s like, ‘This isn’t, it’s not good enough.’ You know, you can’t just put it on a Showtime or whatever.
And then TBS started to get interested, I think, because Chris Jericho was involved, and Jim Ross, I think those two names were the two names that got us the TV deal along with Tony’s [Khan] passion and his commitment, and all these other factors I told you, so it was a little bit. I think that’s why we announced when we did [that] the show doesn’t start till May but we have this TV deal. So we did the press conference.
It was weird having like, I was under contract for five months before I did a match, but it was all part of this build to cement this new company. Because once again, talking about it now three years later, it’s, you know, it’s all that and we would say AEW is huge, there were no guarantees of anything.”
Chris Jericho continued, explaining how AEW has been built up as legitimate competition to WWE, which is why so many marquee stars, such as CM Punk and Bryan Danielson, wanted to wrestle there instead:
“And I think the one thing that we’ve done, the kind of AEW originals, is that we made AEW safe for CM Punk, for Bryan Danielson for Adam Cole. Everyone that’s coming in now, maybe three years ago, wouldn’t have come in because they’re like, ‘Well, we want to see what’s gonna happen with this new company, if it’s going to float’, and we didn’t know.
Our first television deal on TBS was a rev share. And a rev share means you’re basically getting a piece of the advertising, the commercials that you see, we would get a piece of that, we didn’t even have a guaranteed contract. Three months in, though, I call myself ‘The Demo God’ at the time. What does that mean?
Demos are very important. It’s more important, you could draw a million people and have a demo of a 0.2 or draw a 500,000 and have a demo of 0.4, you’d rather have the 0.4, it’s kind of confusing. But after those three months of demos, we get the TV deal of $170 million for four years, whatever it was, after three months, nobody expected that. And once we got that, now we’re a driving force to be reckoned with.”
AEW Dynamite is nearing its three-year anniversary, having premiered on 2 October 2019. That episode ended with one of AEW’s most memorable moments, as Chris Jericho joined with Ortiz, Santana, Sammy Guevara, and a debuting Jake Hager to form The Inner Circle.
Jericho is next scheduled to face Claudio Castagnoli on Grand Slam Dynamite, with the former Cesaro’s ROH World Championship on the line.
If you use any quotes from this transcription, please credit Talk Is Jericho and link back to this article with a H/T to Inside the Ropes.