Examples of good shyt on TNA PPVs in 2007-2008
Pretty much everything with Christian. He was having high quality matches with EVERYONE he got paired up with, be it Joe, Rhino, Angle, a rad triple threat with Sting/Angle, even a good ladder match with Kaz. Honestly he might have been the MVP for a good year and a half and I think he had better matches with Angle and Joe than Angle and Joe had together.
Pretty much all tags with Tomko/AJ. They were a really solid as hell team. You kind of roll your eyes when they had AJ go from face of the company to being in a tag team and lackey of Christian and then Angle, but I think that did a lot for him character and personality wise that he still carries with him today. Tomko was pretty legit. He had a crispness and intensity to him that you often don't get out of guys his size. I might have to check out his NJPW work from the same time, because I can imagine him being in some real banger tags over there.
X-Divison stuff was usually fun flippy shyt, but once in a while you'd get some actual good psychology and story based stuff, usually involving Chris Daniels, but Sabin had some real bangers as champ, and once he and Shelley formed the MCMGs and turned face (as they were trash as heels), they were killing it in tags even against shytty teams like the Dudleys, who were having TERRIBLE matches in TNA. It definitely didn't help that they had a months long feud with the Steiners at a stage where Rick hadn't wrestled for years and had cardio so bad he'd be unable to do ANYTHING 5 minutes into the match and Scott had been a big muscled wreck for almost a decade, but they also had a months long feud that damn near killed LAX, who at the time before the feud were possibly the hottest act in the company and afterwards ended up doing months of Homicide as a singles guy and a low card face turn where they were feuding with teams like Rock N Rave Infection and it would take a full year before they got back into the title scene and not long after they were split up for a failed Hernandez main event push. Probably even worse is immediately after, Dudleys turn heel and also fukk up the X-Division for months. Any way some stand out matches: Sabin vs Dutt vs Machismo, Angle vs Machismo, Daniels vs Sabin, Lynn vs Sabin.
There's an excellent insanely bloody brawl with Chris Harris and James Storm, and you think obviously Chris Harris is a can't miss top star for TNA, then you see him go to shyt in real time. It's fascinating, really. When AMW broke up, he got a few months off to recover from an angle injury, but it was clearly to get on the gas and bulk up. So when he returned he was noticeably bigger, but also much slower, his cardio was gone, and he moved like he was terrified of getting injured. As the months went on he just got more and more out of shape, to the point where the last time you see him (December 2007) he's just a fat puffy mess who doesn't do shyt his entire match and then pops up 6 months later for 3 weeks of WWECW where he was even more out of shape. My understanding was always that he had to get off steroids when he went to WWE and he got fat, but nah he was looking like Braden Walker at the end of his TNA run.
A great Jeff Jarrett/Robert Roode match that happened right before Jeff's wife died, so nothing came from it and Roode went into a holding pattern of "be mean to Ms. Brooks and/or Eric Young for months" and then gets a bad feud with a lazy as hell Booker T at the end of the year. He probably would have risen up the ranks a lot earlier had the feud with Jeff played out.
One thing I've started noticing is in a lot of matches you'll see Kurt grabbing and slapping his hands, and at first I thought it was a weird wrestler thing for grip or some shyt, but now I realize it was because he was having numbness and once he'd start doing that, that hand usually wouldn't open or close the rest of the match.
Overall while there are definitely bad shows (Lockdown 2007 is a disaster from start to finish) and bad angles (mostly everything involving Abyss, 3D, Raven, Karen Angle once she becomes an on screen character) watching from BFG 2006 to January 2008 PPVs over the past few months has been mostly a pretty enjoyable experience. Certainly a lot more than watching WWE PPVs from the same period. Crowds and talent both have a real passion that shines through, and there's a spark to the shows that is completely missing today from TNA, WWE (main roster, at least), MLW, ROH. Maybe AEW can get that alternative hope and enthusiasm in their audience. TNA was definitely at it's best when it wasn't doing WWE rehashes or trying to get WWE to notice them, and at one point in 2007 literally all the ex-WWE stars are heels.