Death of the Critic

WWE has recently begun opening the door to one of the more fascinating rooms in its enormous video mausoleum. Its Vault channel is releasing complete house shows from the Omni in Atlanta, remnants of Georgia Championship Wrestling from the early 1980s that previously survived mostly as newspaper results, old-timer memories and fragments passed between collectors.

Now the shows simply exist. You can watch them. In their entirety.

In a world where many hardcore fans feel like they’ve already seen it all, this has produced an increasingly rare sensation among wrestling fans: discovery.

Viewers too young to have attended events at the Omni—and, in many cases, too young to remember when professional wrestling operated as a series of regional fiefdoms—have reacted with something approaching wonder. The shows are not merely historical curiosities.

They are alive.

The crowds surge and recede. The wrestlers inhabit their characters instead of periodically stepping outside them to assure everyone that they understand the joke and aren’t truly bad fellas. Matches unfold according to rhythms that modern wrestling has mostly abandoned.

Old-school enthusiasts such as Wrestling Playlists have treated these releases as both entertainment and cultural archaeology. Another missing piece of wrestling’s past has been restored, another data point for those trying to piece together the sport’s complicated history. Fans can watch the footage, argue about it and form conclusions that have not been filtered through four decades of received wisdom. For a brief moment, the whole community seemed to have been handed a newly recovered past.

Then Dave Meltzer arrived with the spreadsheet.

Meltzer, professional wrestling’s most influential business historian and foremost critic, to the extent such a position exists, was unimpressed by some of the praise. Georgia Championship Wrestling, you see, was experiencing a commercial lull during portions of this period. Some of the Omni shows did not draw particularly well. The crowds were smaller than they had been during hotter periods.

The joke, apparently, was on the people enjoying the wrestling.

It had not drawn.

It was the perfect argument for our moment because it takes a useful historical fact and uses it to commit intellectual vandalism. Attendance can tell us whether a promotion was commercially healthy. It can help explain why a booker changed direction, why a wrestler lost his position or why a territory eventually collapsed. It cannot reach through forty years of history, sit beside you on the couch and determine whether the match you just watched was good or not.

But this is what the spreadsheet provides and this is the world it’s created. It does not merely provide context for what the viewer experienced. It overrules it.

Fans watched the wrestling and found it compelling. But the market had rendered its judgment in 1983, and no subsequent jury was authorized to reconsider the case.

It’s more complicated than that. Most things are.

There is also an old hierarchy quietly being restored. For decades, wrestling history belonged disproportionately to the people who were there, knew someone who was there or subscribed to the publication whose anonymous sources supplied the accepted version of what had happened. Scarcity of information created authority. The historian, even when his evidence was anecdotal or possibly fictional, possessed something more powerful than an opinion.

He possessed the accepted version of reality.

The Vault disrupts that arrangement. A younger viewer no longer needs to accept that a cold period necessarily means the wrestlers were ineffective or the matches forgettable. They can press play and decide for themselves.

Perhaps this is not conscious gatekeeping. Most gatekeepers don’t see themselves as such—they imagine they are merely maintaining standards. But the function is the same. Once fans can watch the footage and judge for themselves, the old authority starts to wobble. That is when the gate figures come out, even when those figures are themselves mostly bits of lore repeated until everyone accepts them as fact.

This is the Spreadsheet Society: a culture in which people are taught to distrust their own response to art until a financial report tells them what it meant.

It’s one thing for Dave Meltzer to do this. It’s kind of his thing.

But, at some point, without any formal announcement, ordinary people began speaking like vice presidents of content strategy too. Wrestling fans became ratings analysts. Moviegoers became box-office reporters. Pop listeners became chart strategists. Everyone acquired imaginary fiduciary responsibilities to corporations they didn’t own, work for, or even understand.

The number ends the argument—or at least lets everyone pretend the argument has ended. It feels objective. More important, it keeps anyone from having to defend an actual opinion.

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It began, like many terrible ideas do, as a reasonable one.

“Just let people enjoy things” was originally a useful rebuke to a recognizable cultural pest—the professional sneerer who treated enthusiasm as evidence of intellectual weakness. This person could not simply dislike a superhero movie or a pop song. He needed everyone who enjoyed it to understand they had been manipulated by capitalism, inadequate cultural education or some defect in their cognitive capacity.

He was exhausting.

There was value in reminding him that pleasure did not require permission.

But “let people enjoy things” gradually mutated. It stopped meaning that people should be allowed to enjoy mediocre art and began to mean nobody should even be allowed to call the art mediocre. A negative review became an attempt to confiscate happiness. Disappointment became toxicity. Criticism became harassment.

The writer working alone at a kitchen table on a Substack blog was recast as the bully. The multibillion-dollar entertainment conglomerate or celebrity with 10 million followers became the vulnerable victim.

This inversion only makes sense because audiences no longer merely enjoy cultural products. They incorporate them. They become them.

“I like AEW” becomes “I am an AEW fan,” which eventually becomes “An attack on AEW is an attack on people like me.” The same process occurs with WWE, Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, Marvel, DC and almost every corner of modern culture that has been successfully turned into a team sport.

Once taste becomes identity, disagreement becomes existential. A complaint about pacing is not about pacing at all. Not really. It means you think the audience is stupid. Criticism of a singer becomes an attack on young women, barely coded misogyny. Disliking a superhero movie means you hate childhood wonderment or modern tools of creation.

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A bad review is no longer an argument about a piece of art. It is a hostile incursion into somebody else’s sense of self.

This is why modern fan arguments so quickly become moral arguments. A product cannot merely be bad. It must be harmful, offensive or created by monsters. Conversely, liking the product cannot merely be pleasurable. Supporting it must represent kindness, inclusion and human decency.

People defend massive corporate monopolies while speaking the language of resistance. Buying the officially licensed plastic cup becomes an act of progressive solidarity.

The recent battle between Taylor Swift fans and Olivia Rodrigo supporters supplied a nearly perfect demonstration. Swift had a No. 1 song. Rodrigo had a song attempting to reach No. 1. Swift’s continued commercial success was therefore described in some quarters not as a chart result but as an ethical offense.

She had “blocked” Olivia.

The implication was that the top position belonged to Rodrigo by moral right and Swift had selfishly occupied it. It was evidence of greed, insecurity and hostility toward another woman.

Notice what the argument did not require: a discussion of the songs.

Was Swift’s song better? Was Rodrigo’s more interesting? Did either contain a melody, lyric or production choice worth remembering?

Those questions are almost quaint.

Fans instead transformed themselves into amateur chart analysts and prosecuting attorneys. One artist had not merely sold more music. She had committed an ethical violation by winning.

Commercial performance had become moral evidence.

Superhero fandom does the same thing with box-office grosses. Marvel supporters celebrate their franchise’s superiority over DC by producing worldwide revenue totals as though Disney will distribute dividends among everyone who defended Ant-Man online. DC loyalists wait for a Marvel film to stumble and announce that the empire is collapsing.

Whether a comic book film is good in any traditional sense is almost irrelevant. Who cares? Check the opening weekend.

Fans now do public relations work for enormous companies for free, then congratulate themselves when the company makes more money. People who once argued about art now argue about market share. Teenagers who might have debated which hero was more compelling, who they could more easily relate to, instead celebrate one conglomerate’s ability to extract more money from its customers.

From them.

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Politics has inevitably absorbed this logic. The right-wing version is especially blunt. A movie featuring women, gay people, nonwhite leads or any politics more progressive than a 1986 Ford Bronco commercial underperforms, and the spreadsheet is immediately presented as proof that the public has rejected “wokeness.”

The failure is no longer attributed to one screenplay, one marketing campaign, one release date or a collection of poor creative decisions. It becomes a national referendum. The market, we’re told, has voted against feminism.

When an inclusive film succeeds, the same people suddenly rediscover that box office is complicated. Existing intellectual property matters. Marketing matters. Release windows matter. Sometimes audiences simply like a popular character.

Again, the number means whatever the tribe requires. It is objective only when it can be weaponized.

AEW ratings discourse follows the same pattern every week. When the audience declines, critics announce that viewers have rendered a final verdict on the creative direction. When the audience rises, many of the same people explain that one week means nothing. Supporters reverse the formula. A good number proves the show is connecting. A bad number is caused by basketball, cable erosion, holiday travel, news coverage, poor lead-ins or the unknowable habits of people between eighteen and forty-nine.

All of those explanations may contain some truth. Television measurement is complicated. But complication is only acknowledged when simplicity becomes inconvenient.

The rating is treated as an infallible measure of quality until it produces the wrong answer.

The selective worship of numbers explains how these arguments work. It does not explain why fans have become so personally invested in winning them.

There have always been obsessive fans. Beatlemania did not need broadband. Wrestling fans tried to stab heels before anyone could quote-tweet them. The modern difference is an economic system designed to convert emotional identification into recurring revenue.

The old transaction was comparatively clear. An artist created a record, book, movie or performance. The audience purchased it. They talked about it with their friends or in zines. The transaction ended.

The collapse of physical media, fragmentation of audiences and microscopic economics of streaming altered the bargain. For many writers, musicians and performers, selling the work is no longer enough. They must also sell access to themselves.

The creator tweets through breakfast, posts from the airport, shares personal anxieties and addresses paying supporters with the comfortable intimacy of a friend. Patreon, Kickstarter, Substack, Cameo and the VIP package all sell slightly different versions of the same thing—the feeling that the person on the other side of the screen knows who you are. Or cares.

Nobody involved has to be lying for the arrangement to get weird. The artist may sincerely appreciate the people paying the bills. The audience may genuinely feel understood. But the creator knows only a crowd, a username or a revenue category. The fan comes to believe he knows a person—childhood wounds, pets, politics, illnesses and daily emotional weather. They are not meeting on even-ground.

What the audience buys is the sensation of mutual recognition. What the creator receives is recurring income.

Once fans believe they own a tiny piece of someone’s life, they begin protecting that investment.

This is the parasocial protection racket. The creator lets the audience feel close. In return, the audience buys the shirts, pays the monthly fee and patrols the internet looking for enemies.

Being a critic in this world is a dangerous game.

The artist does not need to explicitly order an attack for it to occur. Taylor Swift would NEVER.

A screenshot will do. A quote-tweet. An Instagram story placing a negative review before several million emotionally invested followers. The question “Why are people like this?” functions like a mob boss wondering aloud why a certain restaurant remains standing.

The millionaire is the underdog. The critic with 2,300 followers and a freelance gig at a failing website becomes the powerful aggressor.

In wrestling, the consequences can be tangible. Access disappears. Interview requests go unanswered. Editors decide no article is worth three days of abuse.

I’ve lived it.

Writers learn to preface every negative judgment by affirming that the wrestler seems like a wonderful person, the promotion employs many talented people and nobody should interpret criticism of a televised performance as a wish for personal suffering.

Eventually, it becomes easier to stop judging the performance all together.

This is where the spreadsheet offers refuge.

Numbers create the illusion of criticism without the danger of expressing personal taste. Calling a segment dramatically incoherent could anger the wrestler and their fans. Saying it lost viewers sounds neutral.

Calling a superhero movie lifeless corporate inventory invites a war. Saying it underperformed against projections is “business analysis.”

The critic retreats into metrics because metrics seem bloodless. The fan embraces them because metrics create clear winners and losers.

Wrestling was uniquely prepared for this transformation. The Monday Night War trained viewers to regard ratings as weekly sporting results in their own right. Attendance, television audiences and pay-per-view sales can help explain whether a performer connected with the public.

But what was once useful context became the entire conversation. Fans now debate quarter-hours and demographics they do not understand, merchandise figures they cannot actually see and television contracts from which they will never receive a dime.

The old wrestling fan wanted to believe the punch was real. The modern wrestling fan wants to believe he participated in the earnings call—or could have.

I understand the temptation because I participate in it too. I have dismissed commercial success as irrelevant until it supported my beliefs. Anyone who publishes online learns to refresh the dashboard and watch page views or subscriber totals rise and fall as though the numbers contain some final judgment about the work itself.

The spreadsheet is seductive because it offers something criticism never can: the possibility of being conclusively right.

Two people can argue forever about whether a wrestling match told a coherent story. They cannot argue that a quarter hour gained viewers if it didn’t. A billion-dollar-a-year TV contract sits at the end of a conversation like a court ruling.

But commercial popularity proves only that a lot of people paid attention, spent money or pressed play. McDonald’s has served more meals than the finest restaurant in your city. This does not make the Quarter Pounder civilization’s supreme culinary achievement, though I’d allow top five.

Popularity only tells us that something was popular. People keep asking it to tell us much more than that. It can’t. It’s not an aesthetic judgment. It’s a financial one.

Once we surrender that distinction, ambitious failure becomes indefensible. There is no room for the fascinating mess, the flawed experiment or the work whose audience arrives twenty years late.

Or not at all.

The cult classic becomes impossible because the opening weekend has already delivered the official verdict. The cult, in the world of the spreadsheet, is simply wrong.

We also lose the ability to love something while demanding more from it. You cannot enjoy AEW while criticizing its television. You cannot admire Taylor Swift while disliking the fact she is a product in addition to being an artist. You cannot believe Marvel comics accomplished something extraordinary while wondering whether its assembly line films now produce mostly expensive trailers for future trailers.

You cannot watch a forty-year-old wrestling show, feel transported by it and say that it was wonderful. Not if the building was half-empty.

It no longer matters what you thought you saw. The numbers say you were wrong.

Here’s the thing—taking art seriously means accepting that it can fail. Songs, movies, books and wrestling matches matter enough to deserve judgment, not unconditional affirmation. Honest criticism is not the opposite of love. It is what love looks like after the merchandise table closes.

We traded criticism for bookkeeping. We let box-office grosses, streaming totals, live gates and quarter-hour ratings decide what was true, beautiful and good. Some of my favorite records never sold much. Arrested Development, my favorite television comedy, never found a network audience. The best wrestling ever committed to videotape happened in tiny arenas in Japan in front of nobody.

The bookkeepers can tell us who got rich. They cannot tell us what was worth watching. Only a person can do that. And I’d hate for us to lose the habit.

Jonathan Snowden is a longtime combat-sports journalist and the author of Total MMA, Shooters and Shamrock: The World’s Most Dangerous Man. His work has appeared in USA Today, Bleacher Report, Fox Sports and The Ringer. Subscribe for more essays on wrestling, combat sports and the strange machinery surrounding them.