Views From The Turnbuckle: Can TNA Be Saved?

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In what has really been a never-ending story over the last several years, rumors continue to swirl around the future of TNA. The latest news has TNA being evicted from their main offices (whether or not they were willingly evicted or couldn’t make payments on the building is another story) and TNA desperately looking for investors to buoyant the company.No matter how anyone wants to spin it, it has not been a good last few years for TNA. They are on their third network in as many years, they have all but abandoned the concept of house shows, they are bleeding all identifiable talent and their ratings are at a new low. With that being said, TNA is still managing to turn out a TV show each and every week and does have hundreds of thousands of fans tuning in each week to watch their product. There is still something there for TNA to work with, but their current room for error is rapidly shrinking. What has hurt TNA more than anything is their shrinking TV audience. That goes back to their inability to maintain strong audiences when they were on Spike. When they moved to Destination America and later POP TV, it was expected that they would lose viewers because they were on a smaller network. However, when they were still on Spike TV TNA had all of the tools to become a bigger factor in the wrestling landscape. Whatever revisionists want to say about Spike’s support of TNA, the fact of the matter is they gave them two hours of prime time on a good TV night for years and years. Spike was in 90 percent of American homes, if TNA was doing things extremely well, they could have built their audience during that time period. For a while they did, and they became the highest rated show on the network. The problem became that they were never able to take that next step, consistently gain viewers well over 1.2 million or so, and remained in many fans eyes a small-time promotion constantly playing catch-up with WWE. The beginning of the decline for TNA, and this is something that is frequently talked about, was the hiring of Hulk Hogan and Eric Bischoff. Statistically speaking, Hogan and Bischoff delivered the highest ratings in TNA history, but that run of success was almost immediately snuffed out, replaced instead with absolute mediocrity. Hogan and Bischoff embodied a larger problem that TNA has battled since its inception, and that is an over-reliance on what WWE is doing and they are using. TNA has constantly tried to be a WWE-lite incarnation, and to this day they still struggle with finding an identity. TNA originally did have some form of an identity, …

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