AEW filed trademarks for names like 'Tuesday Night Dynamite' and later 'Wednesday Night Dynamite' before officially settling on the show's schedule, which led many sources to speculate about its airing night ahead of the official announcement.

AEW President Tony Khan chose Wednesday nights for Dynamite instead of Tuesday because TNT aired NBA games on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and to avoid competing with NFL Thursday Night Football, since the Khan family also owns the Jacksonville Jaguars.

Dynamite's premiere on October 2, 2019 averaged 1.409 million viewers, the largest television debut on TNT in the previous five years, and beat WWE's competing show NXT in both total viewers and the key 18-49 demographic, kicking off the so-called 'Wednesday Night Wars'.

WWE responded to AEW's upcoming debut by moving its NXT program to USA Network and expanding it to a live two-hour broadcast in the same timeslot, premiering two weeks before Dynamite's debut.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, AEW ran empty-arena shows from Daily's Place in Jacksonville, Florida, and taped several weeks of episodes at the Nightmare Factory training facility in Norcross, Georgia, using its own employees and wrestlers as the live audience.

To give wrestlers time off during the pandemic, AEW often taped two weeks of Dynamite episodes across two consecutive days, airing one live on Wednesday and taping the following week's episode on Thursday, a method also used to pre-tape Thanksgiving and Christmas specials.

When WarnerMedia proposed expanding Dynamite to three hours to accommodate new programming in 2021, Tony Khan rejected the idea, preferring to launch a separate show, Rampage, on a different night rather than lengthen Dynamite.

On April 16, 2025, Dynamite's special Spring BreakThru episode became the show's 289th episode, making it the longest-running weekly prime-time professional wrestling program in Turner network history, surpassing WCW Monday Nitro's total of 288 episodes.