The Final Deletion didn’t let us down. Broken Matt Hardy and his real life brother Jeff Hardy had one of the most unforgettable wrestling matches of all time Tuesday night on TNA’s Impact Wrestling, in the process setting a ratings high for TNA on Pop TV. Now you can watch the entire thing online.
We were worried that those awesome vignettes would include all the best parts of the angle and match. We were worried that the endearing incompetence of that original Broken Matt Hardy video from last month would be spoiled by them trying too hard to be weird or campy. (Call that the Tommy Wiseau Effect.) We didn’t need to worry. It was tough watching an entire episode of Impact to see every Hardy vignette (the Bobby Lashley / Eddie Edwards and EC3 / Drew Galloway segments were the only non-Hardy standouts), but in the end the Final Deletion match and its lead-in segments were all amazing. From Maxel Hardy’s birthday party at the start of the episode, through the final fates of Broken Matt and Brother Nero at the very end, the Final Deletion served up some righteously campy fun.
The video above is the “director’s cut,” which includes every Hardy vignette from the show and the match itself. If you want to see what happens when drones, fireworks, riding lawn mowers, malevolent gardeners / fathers-in-law, dilapidated boats and more are incorporated into a wrestling storyline and match, you can watch the whole thing here.