New-look Mexican wrestling comes to weekly TV

It was a meltingly hot October day outside the East Los Angeles warehouse converted to a wrestling ring. Inside, things were about to get equally torrid.

In match after match, as about 400 fans cheered and whooped, heavily muscled men executed high-flying leaps to slam their opponents to the floor. Some wore fearsome disguises to conceal their identities. In one match, the male wrestlers competed - shockingly - with a woman.

But this was far from a neighborhood event done on the fly. It was a taping of the ambitious 39-episode TV series Lucha Underground, a reimagined version of Mexico's grand tradition of lucha libre wrestling that aired on filmmaker Robert Rodriguez's El Rey network on Wednesday.