Lucha Underground Reinvents the Wrestling Feud

I know you clicked this link expecting a wrestling column about Lucha Underground and I promise you it will be a wrestling column about Lucha Underground, but first we need to step outside the world of wrestling for a moment. The reason why is because Lucha Underground is doing something in terms of building feuds that we haven’t seen in the world of wrestling. If you want a parallel, you’ve got to go back to the early days of hip hop.

Grandmaster Flash didn’t invent the idea of taking the best groove or hook from a song, called a break, looping it and then building a new song on top of it. Yet he damn sure perfected the art. It was a revolutionary idea, ripping out the choicest piece of a song, the bit that grabs the listener. We’re trained to think of songs as singular structures, not to be disassembled. Flash chucked that line of thinking. He ripped the tenderloin out the song and tossed the rest of the animal. Some considered it sacrilege, but it changed the way songs got made. For instance, Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure” wanders all over the place, but it all needs to be in there, right? Apparently not. You can loop the bass hook, have some goof with frosted hair spit out a mediocre rap over the top of it and you’ve got yourself a hit. It was music for a world with an ever-shorter attention span. It was the all-highlights version of song structure.

Lucha Underground has done the same thing with wrestling feuds. Traditionally we get a moment that kicks off the feud, either the heel does something dastardly or the face stands up for truth, justice and the American way. Then we get lots of talking. So much talking. Tater tots, dummy promos, once in a lifetime one more time. Can you smell the brother, brother, brother, oh yeah, dig it, cause Stone Cold said so. Sometimes the talking is fun, but most of it just fills up air space. Paul Heyman is the industry standard with a mic in his hands. It’s a pleasure to watch him work. Yet do we need multiple weeks of Heyman to make us eager to watch Brock Lesnar unleash his fury inside a wrestling ring? Probably not. And Heyman’s the best there is. Most feuds involve far less eloquent people.

The genius of Lucha Underground is it’s chucked all of that out the window. It’s got one hour per week and it can’t afford to burn up a lot of time with wrestlers standing in a ring, cutting scripted promos. It also isn’t trying to get you to watch something else, like a big Sunday card three weeks from now. Lucha Underground needs to make every episode count and that means it needs to jump right into the action. In order to get the most bang for its buck, the show has streamlined the wrestling feud, breaking it down to those signature moments which touch off and then sustain a clash.

We saw it recently with Chavo Guerrero and Cage. The whole saga took place over three episodes and it literally boiled down to the beginning, middle and end of the feud. Chavo started it by stealing Cage’s Gift of the Gods medallion, because that is the Guerrero way. The next week Cage went to Dario Cueto to complain and Cueto, who didn’t see how that was his problem, informed Cage that if Chavo placed the medallion in the GotG belt then Chavo would be in the seven-person title match. Cage tried to stop Chavo from doing that, but Chavo outsmarted him, getting into the title match. The twist came at the end of that episode, Cage beat down everyone and ensured Chavo got the victory, then he declared Chavo would have to defend the belt against Cage next week.

It culminated that next week with a really fine match where Chavo gave his best performance in seemingly forever, but Cage took the victory. We got an entire story arc over three shows, five segments total. It didn’t tarry long enough to lose steam or give us some throwaway moments in the middle of the ongoing hostilities. Instead it packed in all the essentials without any of the nonsense. Maybe Chavo will seek revenge in future episodes, which would be fine. They’ve left that door open. Yet both guys got their moments to shine and it advanced both of their characters. They fought over a specific prize. It made sense that wrestlers would fight for that prize. Chavo’s dastardly plan almost worked, but Cage stood tall at the end.

In the WWE, TNA or ROH it might take two months to tell that same story, with a pack of dusty finishes and pull aparts thrown in. Turns out we don’t need that. Maybe it’s because Lucha Underground has experienced television pros at the helm, but it feeds us no filler. If you change the channel, you are guaranteed to miss something important.

With the runup to Ultimate Lucha, we’re seeing the streamlined LU feud-building machine snap into action. Killshot and Marty the Moth are at each other’s throats in a feud that kicked off with a fantastic locker room segment. Marty always lives up to his creepy bastard reputation. A few seconds of him getting his demented smile in your face and of course you want to dismantle him. King Cuerno and Mil Muertes also seem to be on a collision course. Their clash has been building all season, ever since Catrina enlisted Cuerno to take the GotG belt off Fenix. Lately Cuerno commandeered the coffin Matanza Cueto buried Muertes in and added it to his menagerie of hunting trophies. Catrina now has revived Mil, who is not going to be happy.

Johnny Mundo, Jack Evans and PJ Black also look like they’re going to wind up defending their trios titles against Fenix, Drago and Aero Star. The second threesome hasn’t officially formed inside Lucha Underground (though they are the defending champions of Chikara’s King of Trios tournament), but Drago and Aero Star have been feuding with Evans and Black all season. Fenix had been stuck together in a trio with Evans and Black by Cueto, who gets off on forming teams of wrestlers who hate each other, but Mundo took him out in an almost perfect piece of television. All we saw was Fenix lying on the ground and then Mundo gave him an extraneous kick. Evans and Black were totally cool with it, and now we’re set for a bombs-away match between six high flyers.

Frankly, now that I’m used to Lucha Underground kicking off a hot feud with one good segment and using cinematic techniques to put over the tension between the combatants, it’s hard to sit through weeks of traditional wrestling builds. As an example, did we need weeks of Seth Rollins and Roman Reigns going back and forth to sell a title match at Money in the Bank, or would one good segment have done it? That would taken us from holy shit straight into the hostilities. The game has changed and Lucha Underground is doing it better.

The formulaic wrestling feud has become a dinosaur. We’ve been introduced to a faster, more efficient model. If TNA and ROH are smart, they’ll mimic LU’s quick build model. If the WWE is smart, it will steal the talented people who figured out how to reinvigorate the weekly wrestling television program. In the meantime, make sure you’re watching Lucha Underground if you want to see the freshest, most entertaining wrestling show of the 21st century. Every week, it’s dropping sick beats.