Easy Breezy

Tyler Breeze and Adrian Neville Backstage Segment

When it’s all said and done, Tyler Breeze may end up having one of the great runs in NXT history. While it’s essentially just a full-blown Zoolander ripoff at this point, the idea of Derek Zoolander done  — Andy put it on the podcast (which will be out tomorrow) — as a “smarmy pretty douchebag” is a brilliant way to turn the diminishing returns of a good guy dunderhead falling up the stairs on his way to saving the world into a self-renewing resource that is self-centeredness so loathsome it’s endearing  as art.

Although he’s derivative, Breeze has become a special kind of performance art rarely found in the medium, especially when the vogue direction is one where the space between the character and the person portraying it is kept to a minimum. Mike Dalton is Tyler Breeze, and he’s locked in on a Rick Rude-level as character. Unlike English, Breeze’s gimmicks seems to work as a direct translation to the big time and what happens when he makes it to the main roster is going to be a matter of how hard he’s willing to work to climb up the ladder, not whether or not he’ll get his chance to make it to the top.

This belongs on … Raw

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