I have a normal weekend routine. I wake up, I feed the cat, I get my own breakfast, and I sit down in front of the TV to eat. If Lucha Underground is on, I watch Lucha Underground. I am a grown man in the year 2024, and I watch Lucha Underground. Unfortunately, it seems the El Rey network is no longer airing Lucha Underground, at least not during my breakfast time, and so it may finally be off the air, ten years after it started and six years after it ended. R.I.P., Lucha Underground.

To explain Lucha Underground is to explain my own history, from late 2020 to present. In October 2020, my partner rescued a very sick kitten from a farm. He is grown, healthy, and quite spoiled at present, but at the time of rescue he was maybe four months old and in poor health. Once he started getting better, he wanted to be around us all the time. Needless to say, I spent a disproportionate amount of time at her place; neither of us could bear to be apart from the cat very long. COVID was also rampant and shut down many of our options, keeping us home much more than normal.

The other factor here is that I wake up early. (No one cares.) My partner does not wake up as early, so I sometimes watch TV until she is up. Her TV had a ton of free streaming channels that I explored, most of which aired complete crap. Just garbage. Reality TV runoff, old sports highlights, movies you’ve never heard of, the worst children’s TV possible. Once in a great while, Bubblegum Crisis. And then, Lucha Underground.

It started as a joke. I didn’t mean to watch Lucha Underground, I just wanted to have it on when my partner woke up, as if the cat and I just watched this basement wrestling when left to our own devices. This worked, initially, and then a man came out for a match dressed like a dragon. His name was Drago, and it became clear that we were in for something more than the point-and-yell sales pitches of WWE.

The cat also liked Drago, who may have been his first real bird in some ways.

So we watched Lucha Underground. It didn’t take long to get into it; the production was pretty solid, and El Rey Network aired it most nights and most mornings. The show had a lot going for it: good characters, good in-ring action, an acceptable number of bad backstage skits. I think the cat enjoyed the bright colors and fast movements, when he wasn’t sleeping on one of us. We did watch other things, having a couple streaming services at our disposal, but many nights we ate dinner and watched Lucha Underground, and then watched a little more Lucha Underground.

When you talk about Lucha Underground, you talk about Dario. You can talk about its place in wrestling overall, or how it might not exist without Robert Rodriguez, or its troubled history. At some point you may even talk about the wrestling. But if you want to talk about the show itself, you start with Wrestling Genius Dario Cueto.

Dario Cueto is, of course, the shellacked hair, only black wearing, proprietor of the promotion. Played by actor Luis Fernandez-Gil, he is equal parts opportunistic business man and barely checked egomaniac. He would not exist without Vince McMahon – I assume wrestling promotions are legally required to have a slimy business antagonist character now – but watching him hold court is its own experience. He loves wielding any amount of power, and there is never a grudge too small to act upon. The man knows how to make a scene.

Nobody loves Dario as much as Dario loves Dario.

Your announcing team is Matt Stryker and Vampiro, who are not bad. The commenting is decent, usually entertaining enough. The less directly involved in the storylines they are, the better. (The exception to this is the one time Vampiro participates in a match, if only for his entrance alone.) The ring announcer, Melissa Santos, is fantastic at her job and a highlight every time she picks up the microphone.

The actual wrestling product varies in quality, but generally ranges from tolerable to great. It’s almost always good entertainment, but there is some nonsense. The backstage skits are pretty bad overall and only occasionally advance the storylines, though they are mercifully limited.

The in ring action contains multitudes. There are legitimate luchadors, thugs with no personality, sideshows, a couple household names. Sometimes the action extends into the stands and onto the roof of Dario’s office, and then suddenly back into the ring. Gimmick matches are common and often Dario-driven. (I still accuse the cat of challenging me to Grave Consequences when he is feeling especially feisty.) There are big events: Aztec Warfare and Ultima Lucha, some tournaments. The show does not lack for fanfare.

Neither of us are Wrestling People, but we quickly found favorites in the ring. My partner liked Aerostar and the other high flying Lucha Super Friends, plus Son of Havoc with his acrobat’s grace in an executioner’s body. I gravitated to Prince Puma and his combination of speed and strength almost immediately. We both appreciated Johnny Mundo, aka John Morrison, aka I Was On Survivor, and The Mack, possibly the largest man to twerk upside down on a wrestling turnbuckle. Even some of the interchangeable goons had their moments! I’m specifically thinking of Mr. Cisco, who shined briefly in the ring before his character died and the wrestler came back as something of a party chicken. In any event, it didn’t take long before we were watching most of the time, no matter who was in the ring.

There were some other good personalities beyond Dario. Mil Muertes, the man of a thousand deaths, often came paired with the vampy, sometimes demonic Catrina, who started out licking Muertes’ victims before moving on to general supernatural nonsense. We also had Famous B, a man who wrestled exactly once before reinventing himself as a loudmouth promoter guaranteeing fame for his clients. Famous B was so popular that the crowd would even chant his phone number with him, 423-GET-FAME. By the time the second season rolled around, certified legend Rey Mysterio Jr had signed on, immediately changing the scale of the show.

Needless to say, the promotion didn’t suffer for talent, though there was plenty of turnover. A core group remained, somehow, but names changed. Per Wikipedia, a lawsuit was filed in 2019 alleging restrictions on wrestlers working for other organizations, and citing comically low pay, limiting the performers’ ability to earn a working living. I’m sure many left for better working conditions as soon as legally allowed.

Lucha Underground ran for four seasons on El Rey, 2014-2018. Its fourth season saw a number of high profile departures, a move to a new arena, aforementioned reports of payroll troubles. Rey Mysterio Jr was gone, Prince Puma was gone, and their latest unbeatable big man was some awful, lumpy thing called Jake Strong. Dario had lost power, gone to jail for a while, regained power, died, and in the show’s finale, seemingly risen from the dead. Both the quality of the show and the business supporting it were struggling.

By the time we discovered the show, it had been closed for a while, leaving its finite four-season run to air ad nauseum on El Rey. It was running mornings, nights, blocks in the middle of the day. The episodes ran in order, but it ran so frequently that tuning in provided a near random episode. Still, exhausting our limited Lucha Underground resources was unavoidable, even if it took a while for the novelty to wear off.

Life picked up: my partner changed jobs, we started figuring out how to move in together, and COVID gradually released its hold on everyday life. The cat thankfully grew past his sickly kitten period into the full grown little monster we love today, and his demands for attention became a greater part of our lives. We retained a lot of affection for Lucha Underground, but we had seen everything. And El Rey began showing more movies, and less Lucha Underground.

I didn’t watch it for well over a year, but checking in once in a while held some allure, and eventually I had to revisit my old sweaty friends. So I might take ten minutes to see who might be receiving A Unique Opportunity from Dario before getting started with my weekend. That guilty early morning pleasure appears to have ended, with El Rey finally removing Lucha Underground from its schedule, giving me little choice but to find something else to stare at during my weekend breakfast. It’s probably for the best, as it may keep me from developing a plan for a fictional fifth season of the show. Regardless, I’ll always remember that period of our lives, where so many nights were spent watching the cat fall asleep after dinner, opening a weird sour beer, and putting on Lucha Underground.

I’m still waiting for that phone call from area code 423. Yes, I’d like to be famous.

P.S. Here is a picture of the cat, happy and healthy.