Tony Khan on Why He Picked Wednesday Night for AEW on TNT, How Commentary Will Be Handled, More

– During the post-AEW All Out media scrum, Tony Khan addressed who will make up the announcing team for AEW programming as well as why they went with Wednesday nights for their TNT show. AEW has a wealth of announcers between Jim Ross, Alex Marvez, Excalibur and the newly-signed Tony Schiavone and Alex “Goldenboy” Mendez, and Khan discussed how they plan to use the team most effectively.

411 was at the scrum and you can see video as well as some highlights below:

On why AEW decided to go with Wednesday nights for TNT: “The process in that decision [of either Tuesday or Wednesday nights] was those were really good nights for a wrestling fan that would not be competing with the most popular show on television, which is the National Football League. The vast majority of the top 100 shows, like over 90 of the top 100 shows are NFL games in this country, in America. And I think it’s about 47 of the top 50 most-watched shows, and 24 of the top 25. So I don’t want to go against the NFL on Monday night, or Thursday night or Sunday night, because I am a part of the NFL.”

On choosing Wednesday instead of Tuesday: “Yeah, we’re partnered with TNT. And Tuesday is — the NBA’s on Tuesday. That’s a pre-existing commitment, and so it wasn’t — I didn’t know a year ago when my TV program was gonna be in. So I knew that where we were, I’d really like to do a weekly television show and give wrestling fans that in their week again. Where you get two hours of live, high-quality wrestling, really higher production values than have ever been available, the state of the art.”

On wanting to serve as a bigger stage for joshi wrestling: “Going into TV, I think the big focus for us is going to be on TV one [the first episode], we’ve got a huge Women’s Title match now. Nyla Rose is already a big star, I think Nyla Rose has already proven that she is a big star. But I put a lot of thought into that. If you didn’t consider Nyla Rose a star before, I think you should now. Nyla Rose vs. Riho, Riho and and Shida was awesome … I believe in joshi and I think that with the platform we have no, we can introduce a lot of fans both here in America and worldwide to the great Japanese women’s wrestlers and style that like, people really love and want to embrace. Similar to almost 25 years ago, 24 years ago when Nitro launched and lucha libre became more prevalent on American television. And I think similarly, the joshi wrestlers are great. And Shida and Riho, I give them a ton of credit. Yuka Sakazaki’s coming in and has done some great things also.”

On how announcing will be handled going forward: “It’s not exactly clear. Tony [Schiavone]’s just joined us, and Alex [Goldenboy] is new to us too. Alex is definitely going to be doing Full Gear, Tony will be at the Georgia football game that day, but Tony’s going to be a big part of Wednesdays. And I expect Tony to be with us on Wednesdays, and Goldenboy will be at Full Gear, it’ll be the same commentary team it was tonight on PPV. And then on TV, I think there’s been a huge demand for fans that want to hear Jim Ross and Tony Schiavone call wrestling together again. And Excalibur also brings a lot of knowledge and really intelligent insight into what’s going on in the matches, and I think he’ll be a really good addition to those guys as well. So I expect we’ll mix it up for PPV and TV. And then also, Tony can keep contributing in the studios and a producer and [in] Control Centers.”

If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit 411mania.com for the transcription.