Lucha Underground aired their first episode on Oct. 29, 2014, almost one year after the launch of its host network, Robert Rodriguez’s El Rey. Right from the beginning, the fledgling wrestling promotion had Rodriguez’s sensibilities all over it, with cinematic backstage segments that oozed the director’s grindhouse aesthetic.
How ‘Lucha Underground’ changed the pro wrestling game
The most original wrestling program on television has finished its first season. Even if the promotion doesn’t survive, its importance will be felt for years to come.
Bill Hanstock is a writer, author and Emmy Award-winning producer. He began writing for SB Nation in 2011.
But Lucha Underground became much more than “the wrestling show on Robert Rodriguez’s channel.” Although it certainly suffered from missteps along the way, it managed to become revolutionary and transcendent in equal measure.
Now, 39 episodes later, their first season is over and the possibility of a second season is still up in the air. There’s no guarantee that Lucha Underground will survive beyond this lone, genre-transforming season.
The first master stroke of Lucha Underground was its aforementioned backstage segments. For nearly 50 years now, pro wrestling has been relying on the tired trope of there just happening to be a cameraman nearby when villains are plotting, or a fight breaks out. Even as wrestling fans have seen kayfabe die a slow death since the Attitude Era of the 1990s, wrestling still treats its backstage segments like a documentary or a sporting program.
Lucha Underground dispensed with the notion of reality altogether, opting to view their out-of-the-ring happenings cinematically. Multi-camera setups, filters, special effects, sound effects, editing -- the backstage bits played out like a film, establishing characters, providing motives and driving the plot. Make no mistake, Lucha Underground was terribly plot-heavy and oftentimes more akin to a serialized cable action-drama where wrestling took up significant screen time.
This one simple tweak -- treating the out-of-ring happenings like a movie -- was so groundbreaking that it’s mind-boggling no one thought to do this earlier. Every other postmodernist approach to pro wrestling -- whether it be MTV’s Wrestling Society X or indie promotions like CHIKARA -- have stuck with the same approach to driving their stories. If it doesn’t happen in the ring, it’s generally a conveniently-placed cameraman backstage, happening to grab a heck of a journalistic scoop. (Yes, CHIKARA did make a serialized film titled Ashes during the year the company was dormant due to a storyline, but that film existed completely outside of their actual wrestling shows.)
Hand-in-hand with Lucha Underground’s cinematic approach was the development of their characters. They created a world where there existed, among other things, a pissed-off, Spanish-speaking ninja skeleton who was collecting broken arms for his unseen “Dark Master,” a literal dragon who was also a wrestler, a man who harnessed the power of death via a magical piece of earthquake rubble who was at odds with a man who had one thousand lives ... and a happy-go-lucky wrestler-turned-announcer who was trying to put his past behind him, but was goaded into once again becoming a literal vampire.
These all sound thoroughly outlandish on paper, of course, but the decision to present these characters to us in the guise of theatrical vignettes rather than in the guise of documentary-style athletic competition, or even within the genre of what pro wrestling had previously been, made all the difference.
WWE has given us a wrestling clown and a wrestling minotaur and a wrestling ninja before, but their outlandish characters were always based in our real world. Lucha Underground threw reality entirely out the window.
Lucha Underground’s wrestling didn’t take place in Madison Square Garden, or even in an arena. It took place in the Temple, a warehouse built by the nefarious Dario Cueto, a man who may hold mystical powers or may be the devil, but definitely keeps his monstrous brother in a cage, the key to which he keeps around his neck. Sometimes he feeds an unfortunate henchman to his brother, but that’s when he’s not busy trying to placate hired guns shaking him down for money, or a ghost-lady making demands on behalf of her supernatural army of the dead.
Wrestling fans are already forced to suspend their disbelief to enjoy wrestling. Lucha Underground just went all the way when no one else ever considered doing the same.
Perhaps most importantly, Lucha Underground was revolutionary in terms of representation and inclusivity. Latino and Chicano characters were front and center, visible, proud and possessing agency. Episodes and storylines took time to explain and reinforce the history of lucha and why its traditions were important, if not sacred. Men, women, minis and exoticos were all portrayed on equal footing. There were intergender matches nearly every week. On Valentine’s Day this year, this was an actual card that the company posted on social media:
Can you imagine any other wrestling company ... heck, can you imagine any other sports anything putting out something that talks about “challenging gender norms?”
The company hasn’t always had a perfect track record. Even with Pimpenela Escarlata up there, the announcers may not have always called his antics in the most progressive way. The character of Catrina gets her and her charges’ powers from licking fallen opponents, which has led to some icky situations.
Perhaps most infamously, good-guy character Angélico used an early intergender match against Ivelisse as a platform for the all-too-common and thoroughly-regrettable “intergender match as attempted sexual assault” template that still thrives on the independent circuit. But almost every time Lucha Underground made their viewers cringe with something that looked outdated or flew in the face of their message of inclusivity, the company was quick to make changes.
They were never perfect, but they were closer than any wrestling company has ever come, by some margin. Perhaps most importantly, they cared about representation. And they cared about getting it right.
Wrestling fans are currently living in a golden age. In-ring talent and performance is better than it has ever been. WWE, TNA and Ring of Honor all have national television deals. WWE’s minor league system, NXT, is a cult phenomenon that has changed the way WWE proper has done business. The independent scene is thriving worldwide. Japan’s most lauded wrestling promotion, NJPW, has their own subscription service to rival the WWE Network.
Among all these options, Lucha Underground has still felt like a breath of fresh air. The people that watch it weekly love it passionately. It is important to them.
The fans who go to the Temple for the tapings are referred to as “Believers.” It’s a fitting term for a company that has worked so hard to make it okay to believe in wrestling fantasy again. In its first season, Lucha Underground has smashed plenty of the parameters that have held wrestling in stasis for so long.
Even if the company never returns, they’ve let the cat out of the bag. Now it’s up to the rest of the pro wrestling world to march boldly into the future. Lucha Underground has left a terrific set of footprints for them to follow.
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