TNA first hit our screens 10 years ago on June 19, 2002. But the company’s roots in fact date back to a 1995 WWE PPV event, In Your House 2 where alleged country music superstar Jeff Jarrett performed his “hit song” With My Baby Tonight before dropping the Intercontinental title to Shawn Michaels.
The show was mean to kick off a feud between Jarrett and his “Roadie” Brian Armstrong (later DX’s Road Dogg) when it would be revealed the latter had actually performed the track. In fact the pair walked out of the venue before the broadcast ended, quitting the company in a dispute that (depending on the account) involved money, drug testing or concerns that the feud was being rushed.
Although Jarrett returned to the company at the end of the year, a second incident in 1999 cemented his fate indirectly led to TNA existing today. Jarrett signed a deal to jump to WCW alongside writer and friend Vince Russo. Such jumps were hardly a rarity in the era, but what was different was that sloppy administration on WWE’s part meant Jarrett’s contract expired the day before he was due to once again drop the I-C title, this time to Chyna.
While the WWE side claimed Jarrett held up the company for a large cash bonus in order to work the match, Jarrett himself says he simply asked for outstanding PPV bonuses and royalty payments to be paid immediately. Either way, Vince McMahon made the deal but also developed a long-lasting grudge.
Said grudge was still in effect in March 2001 when McMahon bought out WCW and publicly fired Jarrett on national television. With ECW just days away from filing for bankruptcy, Jarrett was suddenly left with no way to make a full-time living in the United States.
After discussing the problem with his father Jerry — a long-time promoter in the Memphis region — Jarrett decided that the solution was to run his own shows and tried to find a viable format. The territories era tactic of relying on the gates from weekly live events promoted on local television was clearly out the window in the age of national cable TV. On the other hand, the experience of the international touring WWA group (which scooped up some of the now unemployed WCW and ECW talent including Jarrett) had shown that running standard US pay-per-views without strong television to promote them was not the path to riches.
Instead the pair settled on a hybrid format. of weekly event available live as a two-hour PPV for just $10. (After early shows in Alabama and at the Nashville City Auditorium, they settled on the Nashville Fairgrounds — dubbed the TNA Asylum — as a permanent home.) The theory was that the low price would attract curious viewers who’d then be drawn in each week to keep up with feuds and storylines, each show serving as both pay-off and promotion.
Ironically it was an attempted financial power-play by McMahon that helped turn the idea into reality. WWE’s recent attempts to persuade PPV distributor In Demand to give the promotion a larger share of revenue had been so poorly received, In Demand almost instantly agreed to sign a one-year deal with the Jarretts.
Under the banner of NWA:TNA (National Wrestling Alliance and Total Non-Stop Action), the new group went live at 7pm on June 19, though the in-ring action was delayed after a disastrous moment when the ring broke in a dark march. In the main event, Ken Shamrock defeated Malice (formerly WCW’s The Wall) to win the fortuitiously-vacant NWA World title.
The roster in the early years was made up of a diverse mix of former WCW and ECW performers, local indy talent (James Storm appeared on the first show), 80s era WWE legends, and a new breed of high-flyers promoted under the X-Division banner with the memorable-if-illogical slogan “it’s not about weight limits, it’s about no limits.”
Surprisingly shows based around the X-Division style, with talent including AJ Styles, Low Ki, Jerry Lynn and Chris Daniels, were among the better performing episodes, due in part to strong business on replay showings after word spread about exciting matches.
It wasn’t all traditional in-ring action, however. Early shows also featured lowbrow comedy such as Rod and Dick Johnson (two men dressed as penises), Saved By The Bell’s Dustin Diamond boxing an obese timekeeper, and a midget apparently pleasuring himself in a dustbin. The addition of Vince Russo to the creative team certainly didn’t slow down this process.
In the early weeks, it appeared the weekly PPV format had been a huge success. Jay Hassman, hired by TNA to deal with the cable companies, reported to Jerry Jarrett that the first show had drawn around 75,000 to 80,000 buys, a figure well above that of WCW in its dying days and safely above the 55,000 needed to break even. Although the second show dropped to around that level and the third to around 38,000, Jarrett felt his concept validated and confident enough to carry on spending under his original plans.
In fact it soon emerged that the figures reported by Hassman were bogus. The three shows combined had actually drawn around 50,000 buys, with Jarrett alleging that “Hassman had created a fake report and used an InDemand letterhead. Not only that, but he told InDemand not to market us because his company was handling the marketing.”
Although it must be noted there has never been any firm proof to claims that Hassman was working as a saboteur on behalf of WWE (a lawsuit by the Jarretts against him was dropped by mutual consent), Hassman was later convicted of business-related fraud charges relating to work with another employer.
By August, the Jarretts had cut spending to the point that each week’s show was likely to break even, but were still in a deep financial hole: partly through the initial over-spending and partly through cashflow problems caused by the delay in receiving payments from cable operators. The pair were forced to allow financial backers Health South to increase their stake in the company from 15% to 40% in order to extend credit and began exploring the possibility of getting out of the business amid fears Health South would pull the plug completely.
Jeff Jarrett mentioned the situation to Dixie Carter, a local public relations company owner who’d done some work for the company. While he expected she could pitch a takeover of TNA to some of her clients, Carter in fact persuaded her father’s company, environmental power plant producer Panda Energy, to buy out Jerry Jarrett’s majority stake and settle with Health South. (Panda took over Jeff Jarrett’s share to take complete control in 2009.) Jerry remained a part of the creative team until the spring of 2003 when he decided to quit the company altogether.
TNA retained the weekly PPV format for two years, with in-ring highlights including Ron “The Truth” Killings rising to stardom and taking the NWA title before forming the multi-cultural 3 Live Kru with BG James (Brian “Road Dogg” Armstrong) and Konnan. Meanwhile Jeff Jarrett and Raven engaged in a much-praised four month build-up to their first contest.
In 2004, TNA signed a one-year TV deal with Fox Sports Network and quickly decided it made more sense to switch to the traditional monthly PPV format. Very little else was traditional about the new TNA Impact television show however. The action switched to a six-sided ring, an idea taken from Mexico’s AAA and Japan’s T2P promotions. Although most wrestlers found the shape of the ring made little practical difference, from a promotional standpoint the explanation was that the shorter ropes were tighter and with more spring, thus allowing a faster pace on rebounds, and more stability for aerial moves, both effects giving a logical explanation for characteristic X Divisions style.
Meanwhile the matches had time limits (10 minutes for singles bouts, 20 minutes for tag or title bouts) with an on-screen clock and retired wrestlers acting as judges in the event of a time limit draw. Again, the short time limits meant working at a more frenetic pace made storyline sense.
The taping of the show, along with much of the company’s office, moved to Universal Studios in Orlando. The new home, officially known as Soundstage 21 but redubbed the Impact Zone, had formerly played host to WCW’s syndicated television shows and the 1999 revival of sports-entertainment skating show Rollerjam. While the facilities were undoubtedly superior for taping TV shows, one downside was that TNA was unable to charge fans for attending the venue, even for PPV broadcasts.
With ratings hovering at a disappointing 0.3 (due partly to poor timeslots on Friday afternoons and Saturdays at midnight) the FSN deal wasn’t renewed and for the summer of 2005 TNA was left distributing Impact online until it found a new TV slot.
Once again it was events in WWE that proved fateful: despite a decline in business, Vince McMahon was fortunate enough to have two bidders when the Raw contract came up for negotiation and plumped to leave Spike and return to the USA Network. Not only was TNA able to take the wrestling slot on Spike (albeit on Saturdays rather than as straight replacement on Mondays), but unlike with the FSN deal they did not have to pay to get on air and instead begin making money from TV.
2006 would provide the most dramatic changes in TNA’s structure to date. In April it moved to late Thursday nights, switching to a prime-time slot in November. The national TV exposure (reaching an audience almost three times as large as on FSN) persuaded management to begin running live events, a move that had financial risk, but made it more financially viable to put wrestlers under full-time contracts and prevent them being snapped up by WWE if and when they got over with the crowds.
In September TNA announced its biggest signing to date, bringing in Kurt Angle fresh off a headlining role in WWE. While naturally portrayed by TNA as Angle voluntarily making the leap, WWE sources suggested the company had at best been comfortable with releasing him and at worst actively ditched him rather than risk a public relations nightmare if his apparent health concerns worsened.
Either way, Angle was an immediate draw, with his first PPV match — against Samoa Joe, who was on a 17-month undefeated streak in the company — drawing what is believed to still be the company’s all-time highest buyrate of 60,000. The pair clashed again three times in the next two months with predictably diminishing results, but were able to draw big on a second run in 2008.
Dutch Mantell, who was part of the creative team at the time, later told the Figure Four Daily radio show that he wanted to avoid the mistakes of the first run in which fans got tired of repeated physical interaction between the pair: “I wanted to steal a page from UFC or a championship boxing fight. Those guys don’t fight each other every week; they sit back and talk about each other.”
Main eventing the Lockdown all-cage PPV, Angle and Joe engaged in an old-school sports-like build-up with no creative angles and a serious approach that stood in stark contrast to the rest of TNA programming. The match drew well over double what the promotion averaged for the rest of the year, but for unknown reasons TNA decided not to repeat the promotional strategy.
Indeed, “more of the same” was much the story of TNA in the first few years of its run on Spike. The company dropped a licensing deal with the NWA in 2007 and rebranded its titles as TNA championships. Later in the same year, Impact switched to two hours. The joke at the time was that under the creative direction of Vince Russo (who returned from a two year absence the same week as Kurt Angle debuted), Impact had involved cramming two hours worth of angles into a one hour show, but that switching to a two hour slot simply encouraged the writers to come up with four hours of material.
Either way, neither the length of the show nor its content made much significant difference to business. Ratings rose in the months after Angle’s debut but quickly plateaued. Pick any week at random from late 2006 onwards and it was a pretty safe bet the rating would be between a 1.0 and a 1.2. The company had attracted a loyal audience, with surprisingly high quarter-hour ratings for the women’s division, and even strong opposition on TV or shows falling on holidays had little impact on ratings. But there was no sign of growth to speak of at the box office, while PPV buyrates appear to have begun sliding in 2009.
Being stuck in a rut left TNA management deciding to roll the dice with one last push at expansion. In late 2009 the company announced the signing of Hulk Hogan, with Eric Bischoff coming along for the ride. Even more dramatically, the company booked a special three-hour Monday night slot for January 4, 2010, going head to head with Raw for the latter two-hours. Hogan was certainly confident, stating that “If we’re going to war, we’re going to win… this company is better at everything they do. We’re just going to show we’re the better company with the better product… TNA has everything we need to go somewhere that no sports entertainment company has ever gone before. ”
The Monday broadcast proved the ultimate hotshot with Hogan joined in his on-screen debut by Ric Flair, along with the TNA returns of Scott Hall and Sean Waltman, plus unveilings of former WWE names Val Venis, Shannon Moore, Orlando Jordan and the Nasty Boys. The hotshotting worked, with TNA hitting a record 1.45 rating despite competing with the return of Bret Hart to WWE television.
With it being impossible to bring so many surprises and twists to every week’s episode, it was no surprise that the regular Thursday night broadcasts of Impact swiftly fell back to normal levels. TNA was able to persuade Spike that Monday night competition was the way to go, with the potential to capture Raw viewers who were channel surfing during commercial breaks, and plans for quarterly Monday specials were replaced with a permanent slot from March.
Unfortunately the company couldn’t capture lightning twice and after just four weeks of direct head-to-head battles, ratings had collapsed by almost half to a 0.56, the lowest in the Spike TV era. Moving the show forward so the first hour at least was unopposed helped bump things up a little, but two months later the Monday audience was still well below what the company had been doing on Thursdays. TNA moved back to its original timeslot, effectively declaring surrender just four months into the “new Monday Night Wars.”
Since then, TNA has been stuck running in place. TV ratings remain largely unchanged, house show attendance is hit and miss (what boost was brought by Hardy appeared to slip away when he turned heel), and the only real momentum has been of the unwanted kind when it comes to pay-per-view. The company’s booking suggests it sees itself primarily as a television show with no hope of drawing numbers on PPV, and that may well have been a self-fulfilling prophecy.
While numbers are hard to verify because TNA is a privately held company (with little reason to boast about specific buyrates), most reports suggest a consistent drop over the past few years despite the influx of name talent. Most shows now appear to be doing less than when the company was on FSN and headlining with the likes of Styles, Daniels and Joe.
If reports of buyrates as low as 8,000 are correct, the company may barely be making money on the shows, giving further credibility to suggestions Dixie Carter might consider ditching PPV altogether if it wasn’t for ongoing contracts with cable companies. Perhaps the most telling verdict came when last year’s Hulk Hogan-Sting match at Bound For Glory (a pairing that once drew 700,000 buys for WCW) reportedly attracted just 23,000 buyers, lower than any WCW or even ECW buyrate, and barely beating out an ECW reunion themed TNA show in 2010.
Indeed, while TNA tried to fill the void left by WCW, its current position is more akin to ECW during that companies run on what is now Spike TV: similar ratings to ECW’s peak, similar house show attendance, lower buyrates but better deals from licensing and overseas sales. The big difference is the depth of the pockets of its financial backers.
Nobody seriously pretends TNA is ever going to be a threat to WWE, and realistically it will simply stay in place until Panda Energy decides it is no longer financially viable. The recent news that Spike has extended a multi-year extension to Impact’s contract is certainly encouraging, but the company does remain dangerously reliant on the whims of TV executives.
That said, for all its ills the wrestling business is better off for TNA having survived 10 years. It’s given many wrestlers full-time work, including those whose style or look isn’t compatible with WWE’s requirements. It’s presented an alternative product in some regards, particularly when it comes to blood, excessive violence, raunchy language and other components that don’t fit WWE’s programming ethos. And however unsuccessful TNA programming may be in many respects, Impact still fills a slot for around 1.5 million dedicated viewers who want another two hours of programming.
It would be a brave move to bet on TNA being around in 2022, but few will have expected that a company that began without television in Huntsville, Alabama would still be going steady, if not strong, 10 years later.
