The Bar With No Name

The year is 2022

NXT's structure was set around the WWE Performance Center in Florida where new talent would travel to live and breath wrestling, getting familiar with how WWE ran things. the company accepted fresh new promising talent, as well as rising super-stars in other promotions that didn't yet know how things were done in WWE

One of these rising super-stars was Theresa Schuessler, aka Fallon Henley. Originally she'd build her name in the lower tier promotions before heading over to NXT, though she did appear in a few AEW matches during her early years as well

But when we get to 2022, Fallon has officially signed a developmental contract with NXT, working full-time with the company, and reinventing herself with the "Country Grit" gimmick, going all in on her ... Tampa, Florida background

Well, whether or not she actually grew up as a real "country grit" working girl, she dived all in on her gimmick. She aligned herself with Josh Briggs and Brooks Jensen and formed a pseudo faction of roughhousing rednecks operating from Fallon's family bar.

Yes, this is what the article is actually about. Fallon's Family Bar

Why?

Because it is REALLY WEIRD!

You might not immediately think so, but really look back at AEW, ECW, WCW, and even other WWE/WWF franchises. Because the episodes were aired live in a traveling structure, with everyone moving from town to city to town, no one actually had a real single spot  they could call home. A wrestler might have a hotel room they were crashing in for the night, or a house their family lived that they'd return to, but for the most part, all activities in the wrestling promotion that didn't take place in the ring, took place either backstage or in the locker room. 

But Fallon's Family Bar? This was a proper set. a real fake bar that they'd film various scenes in where Fallon, Josh and Brooks would talk about the stuff happening in NXT.

Not only that, but it had plot relevance

One of my all time favorite NXT storylines ever is the feud between Fallon Henley and Kiana James, which starts because Kiana, the greedy corporate ceo, wants to buy Fallon's family bar for... apartment purposes. or was it condos? high-rises? it doesn't really matter. Kiana is as much a "real" CEO as Fallon is actually from the country. What matters is Kiana looks super sexy in office chic and is the bad guy of the story, and she wants to buy Fallon's bar.

the story would drastically expand beyond a simple real-estate conflict, but this also brings up that Kiana has an actual office. a corporate CEO office that is also a set used by NXT. actual real physical locations that exist in the same neighborhood as the WWE Performance Center

the only other program i can think of that did anything like this was Lucha Underground, but that show is also such an incredibly unique program that deserves multiple articles about it, so we'll leave that behind.

Fallon would more or less abandon the bar as a location after her feud with Kiana James ended, but this wouldn't be the only physical location Fallon would set stories around. After Kiana, Fallon moved her ire towards rich pretty girls onto the QUEEN of rich pretty girls, Tiffany Straton. This time her feud with Tiffy would result in Fallon defeating her and taking her to her family's horse ranch to work as a ranch hand. Cleaning horse stalls and other manual labor. Its all very silly and a great watch

In the end though, both the ranch and the Bar would not remain permanent fixtures of NXT. Once the story no longer needed them to exist, they ceased to be and didn't get brought up again. In fact, Fallon has entirely abandoned her "Country Grit" gimmick at this point in her career, becoming a generic bad-girl, doing generic bad-girl stuff.

But on the topic of wrestling heels and permanent fixtures to NXT's setting that DO remain constantly involved in NXT at all time, we have The Don of NXT's Italian restaurant.

Joseph Ariola, aka "Tony D'Angelo", aka "The Don of NXT" or just "The Don" or "Tony" for short, had signed up with NXT a year before Fallon, but began his "Family" gimmick around the same time Fallon joined properly. He teamed up with his "Underboss" Channing "Stacks" Lorenzo and Adriana Rizzo and orchestrated his criminal operations from within the family restaurant

It made perfect sense. Tony was an italian mafia stereotype, and as per the stipulations of being such a stereotype, he needed to embezzle his money through a 'legitimate business' while still presenting as an Italian stereotype at all times (i say this with love, im also Italian American)

But the restaurant wasnt just a generic meeting place for Tony's faction. the crew would meet to have dinner with their opponents before battling them as a form of intimidation, it felt like a real place the crew operated from

And it wasn't just the restaurant.

Tony and the gang had auxiliary supporting characters who'd show up to make the organization feel larger than the WWE itself. like an actual criminal organization embedding itself in WWE. They'd also go to secret chop shops to intimidate people by threatening to dispose of people. Or drive by a bridge to threaten to murder the NXT champ and dump his body in the river.

But all of it was centered around this hole in the wall Italian restaurant. Its so important to their characters, that even though NXT has started traveling from city to city like the other WWE brands have, Tony and the family still meet from inside the restaurant. like it magically follows the brand as it moves around

Which only adds more questions... but at the same time, doesn't.

While Fallon's family bar was a singular specific bar with personal history to it, the D'Angelia Family Restaurant does not need to be 1 single Italian restaurant. it could be any number of fronts the family has all over the country that all happen to look identical to one another. It doesn't matter where the restaurant is, it just matters that its Italian and run by the mob. 

Maybe this is why Fallon eventually gave up her bar, while the D'Angelos never gave up the restaurant. Its way easier to include any random Italian restaurant into a scene. its not as easy to use any random bar and have it mean the same thing for Fallon

But that's a real shame.

there's something really fascinating around the idea of a local pub that the various wrestlers all congregate to. Imagine a wrestler drowning their sorrows at the bar after a humiliating loss. Or a tag team duo playing pool in the corner while they debate their next plan. Or a bar fight breaking out into a hardcore match. You could have the Don show up and do a protection racket or try to run illegal bets on matches in the back of the bar.

a Bar is a perfect location to keep around as a permanent location for a promotion as story-focused as NXT is. maybe like how Stone has stuck around as Ava's yes-man assistant, there could be a semi-retired nxt wrestler now working as a bar-hand at the bar, giving them a few lines now and then and interacting with the other characters

This is one of the biggest benefits a wrestling promotion has from setting its story in a single location. you get to take full advantage of the setting to do stuff that other promotions cant get away with as easily

and I for one can't wait for Fallon's inevitable face turn where she returns to the dust-covered bar and seeks to clean up her act and this abandoned spot on her soul