During the latest edition of the AEW Unrestricted podcast, Tony Khan commented on the reason he puts wrestlers around the ring to act as an audience, where he got the inspiration from, and more. You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On where he got the idea to put wrestlers around the ring to serve as the audience on AEW Dynamite: “The March 18th episode, what we started doing with an audience of wrestlers around the ring, when I went from Salt Lake City and decided we were gonna go out to Jacksonville, that weekend, I watched a lot of other programming, I watched a lot of wrestling and watched a lot of other stuff too, and tried to get a feel of what people were doing with the restrictions and without an audience, and the thing that really captivated me, I have a really good friend who is a writer for Jimmy Fallon and he works on The Tonight Show, and I watched the shows Jimmy Fallon was doing without an audience, and he had his writers and his band in the studio, small group of people, and their laughter, that exchange they had, it made all the difference, and I watched other talk shows where they were just out there kind of cold, and I thought the The Tonight Show and Jimmy Fallon were really on to something, and I thought, that’s kind of what we want to do.”
On being happy with AEW Dynamite’s TV ratings: “We’re on a good trajectory and our numbers were up, to be up in the 18-49 is the thing that, at the end of the day, I’m going to be judged on here, that we’re gonna be judged on, that we’re doing very well there, trending well, and to be up in the 18-34 like 19%, I was doing cartwheels last night when we got the ratings.”
(h/t – 411 Wrestling)
