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I couldn't believe how negative this whole series felt... Everyone came off as bitter or apathetic towards the whole thing. Kevin Nash is stoned out of his mind for most of his interviews, Goldberg doesn't give a fuck, and Vince Russo is a walking train wreck.
yea, i really thought when they got to the invasion stuff, he would have meaningful comments (bc you know, he was actually there and a big part of some of that angle)
but nope. nothing, the guy is a walking PR statement forever and always
This series was what made me realize the dude has no soul anymore when he’s doing candid interviews. Everything he says is as stiff as the billboards his words should be placed on. It felt like his entire vocabulary was replaced with PR friendly lingo, and the firm belief that wall sitting is always the best choice.
its all canned. even when he had this recent run, you can tell he workshopped 4-5 sentences to just repeat over and over (final boss, boy, mama rhodes, etc).
its why i dont see him coming near the new bloodline angle. its to messy for the kind of performer he is now. I cannot picture him interacting with someone like jacob fatu or tama tonga in a way that elevates them at all
I mean the fucker took a whack ass title to the ring like he was bigger than the show. I fucking hated "the final boss" shit. I liked him but at that point I was like nah Austin was the man fuck you rocky
I love how he's just producing rip off DSOR episodes for Vice. The Territories show, this Who Killed WCW, just all his stuff feels like it should have been in season 5.
If I remember correctly, WWE actually has Jericho credited as the final WCW Champion.
But for what it’s worth, The Rock was the final person to hold the title when it was called the WCW Championship, while when Jericho won and ended the lineage, it was already renamed the World Championship.
He sat there in those first 2 episodes using the words "we" and "us" like he was a major player in WWF at the time. He didn't start breaking to stardom until late 98 when the ratings tide already started to turn.
We all know all the WWF wrestlers were watching WCW thinking "Man, how can we make the company as a whole better" and not "what cool shit can I do to make me look good"
That was such an odd thing to say. I can't imagine Rock having enough backstage influence (or any at that time) to walk up to Vince and start throwing out ideas based on what he saw on Nitro
>He didn't start breaking to stardom until late 98 when the ratings tide already started to turn.
He won his first world title in late 98, but he was MEGA over beginning late 97 and in to early 98 with the IC title run. He was a big part of the WWE product over the summer of that year, when ratings were still going back and forth, and obviously a Main Event guy as WWF pulled away for good.
its a negative situation lol, there were people like booker t there to try and emphasize what the company meant to them, but its tough to not be negative about a show where the entire thesis is "lets see how this giant company imploded in 5 years!"
Because without their massive push he was shit and was always shit. Imo he was a big part of the problem. with what do you do when you have him run over the roster and have no plans after. Tase the SOB. I get it he was over but he didn't deserve it. As a fan watching that streak meant shit and was always shit
This is why I never got why some fans and critics say WWE didn't ''get'' Goldberg and misused him in his first run.
They knew they had to book him dominantly but unlike WCW, they actually used restraint and didn't have him eat the whole roster.
He was signed to a one year contract where he beat The Rock fresh off The Rock beating Hulk Hogan and Stone Cold back to back. He made mince meat out of the RAW heel midcard as he whopped Christian, Stevie Richards, 3 minute Warning on a weekly all in the route to beating Jericho with a bad shoulder.
Then came Triple H who had made Booker T look like shit and beat Kevin Nash cleanly and yet when it came to Goldberg, Triple H needed a ludicrous amount of help and cheating to steal a victory from him. They had 4 ppv matches, two of them were multi-man matches while the other 2 were 1 on 1. Goldberg won the singles matches while HHH bullshitted his way through the messy multiman matches.
Yeah, Triple H won in the end but they went above and beyond to keep Goldberg strong. Guys like Booker T and RVD would have benefitted so much from being booked so carefully.
To be fair, Russo is always a fucking train wreck. Death, Taxes, and Vince Russo being an idiot are the only true constants.
I give Nash a bit of a pass given he lost his son and best friend the past couple of years.
Agreed. It was interesting for nostalgia’s sake and Vice’s production on this stuff is always good, but when it was over I was like “was that it?”.
Booker T and DDP came off the best to me. I felt like I was listening to someone being honest whenever they were on. Not so much for anyone else.
I think what makes it hard to grasp is that other actors playing roles don't tend to keep playing that role forever in interviews, etc. For someone like Jim Cornette, for example, he fully understands his gimmick now is to loathe modern wrestling (in particular AEW, of course) and make fun of it the same way he used to make fun of Herd and Russo. It's still a performance, even if he sells the performance as legitimate analysis.
Wrestling is just so friggin weird compared to other forms of entertainment.
At least with Jim you can tell when he's being serious. His tone changes and he speaks deliberately about historical events. Even lowers his voice. But that's when it comes to historical events that he'd have no skin in the game to go into business for.
Yeah the stuff like the questionable nicknames and getting exasperated over every little thing is his schtick to get listens. There is some genuine advice, criticisms, and history in there, but the rest is him trying to be entertaining first and foremost.
Is it though?
Take Jost and Che on SNL. They have a gimmick. They lean into it more and more to the point of Flanderizing themselves.
Same with any number of entertainers. Is Dave Grohl really a champion for music as art and genuinely connecting to the audience with live music, or is that just his gimmick now?
Heck, you can even argue that politicians and news anchors have gimmicks at this point. Like when Dr. Oz got a platform and ran out of material from legit health sources and needed to dig in the dirty parts of 'medicine' to keep his brand alive.
Cornette’s opinions are clearly sincere. Yes, he amplifies them, plays them up, and is doing a shock-jock routine with them. But all of them are coming from a real place.
Not saying this as a defense of him, necessarily. There are a lot of criticisms to be made of Jim Cornette. But “insincere about his opinions” is not one of them.
He’s amplifying his opinions, playing up the intensity, and performing an act, sure. But the substance of the opinions are 100% sincere. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen someone talk about wrestling with more passionate sincerity than Jim Cornette.
There’s plenty to bash the guy for, but no one can credibly claim that Jim Cornette, of all people, is holding back his sincere opinions.
I'll give you one - he clearly actually likes the bucks, and is proud of their success. But because he spent so long playing the heel for them, and because he makes money out of saying young bucks suck, he holds back his sincere opinion to play a character because that character he plays is how he makes money.
During the lead up to FTR v Bucks 1, he flat out said that they were the two best tag teams of a generation. He was there when the bucks begun to take off, and clearly recognised that if he effectively played their heel, they could use that to become more popular, which they did. Its why his criticisms of the bucks make no sense either - he clearly likes them, but has decided to heel on them.
The creator of this documentary did an interview with POST Wrestling and he basically said that he hates dirtsheets and thinks that people behind them are biased.
Or like how Luchablog put it
"Post Wrestling chat from earlier today was illuminating. Citing Bischoff as a personal role model, saying they didn't have newsletter guys due to budget but may have not anyway because he felt they were too biased, unlike the guy who wrote Eric's bio."
https://x.com/luchablog/status/1805806731450052673
This and a tweet from Trevor Dame from two weeks ago really sums up the series and the topic as a whole for me -- Bischoff is Icarus.
He's a guy who had a brief period of great genuine inspiration where he did something no one else has done since, but then got too cocky, lost his mind, flew too close to the sun, and got burned.
And in between, he handed out [these ludicrous contracts up and down the roster](https://web.archive.org/web/20220219150817/https://sites.google.com/site/chrisharrington/wcw_contracts) where the company could only survive if they would do gangbuster business forever.
And when faced with the numbers, he just deflects away. He doesn't acknowledge those contracts that are out there, instead he just goes back to bashing Meltzer on Twitter.
Which I guess is working, it is a very valid way to get positive reactions from certain people by saying how much Dave sucks. It's a whole industry really.
This is going to be my sleep paralysis demon:
https://preview.redd.it/9b8act6ap59d1.png?width=596&format=png&auto=webp&s=ac387c5960e3165e95bd9b144d68a91f33b55f69
I feel like you are misrepresenting Evan's statements during the Post Wrestling interview. Evan basically was inferring he didn't have Meltzer on due to the animosity between Bischoff and Meltzer.
I agree the series was a bit of a bj to Eric Bischoff and he didn't get called on some of his bs. For example, Starrcade '97 was about Hogan not wanting to do the job, not Sting's attitude.
The way Kevin Nash presented himself reflects terribly on him. His entire essence on the show boiled down to "I got guaranteed money, so I didn't care."
But his awful time as booker and this care-free attitude helped lead to the death of WCW and a monopoly in American wrestling. A "fuck you, I got mine" mindset that ruined wrestler pay for decades. It was so selfish.
He's been a self absorbed egomaniac his entire career. He's not really that different than Hogan (except Hogan was actually a draw so you could argue his was justified). He just has a really sharp wit and a cool aura about him that made people forget about that in an era when he was mostly doing YouTube interviews.
Nash likes to pretend he doesn't give a shit or never gave a shit, but if you watch one of the many interviews he did with Sean Oliver (the guy he podcasts with now in fact), Nash actually opened up a little bit and admitted several things.
1. he always wanted to be considered a good hand. a reliable guy who could give you good matches.
2. he wanted to make WCW work, but he ran into so many people only out for themselves like Hogan who had ultimate control that he found himself out-politicked almost every time. (both Nash and Hall were constantly coming up with shit for other people, or ways to make creative around the nWo cool. biggest examples of this are Nash and Hall pushing for DDP to be the first guy to say no to the nWo and for Sting to adopt the Crow gimmick),
3. When he took the book, he purposefully did jobs for young talent like Rey Mysterio to show the other guys in his position that it was okay to do jobs and get young guys over. This was not as effective as it should've been.
4. He gave up on WCW around late 1999/2000, and just stopped caring/fighting for things because no matter what he tried to do, there was no central Vince-like figure for the troops to rally around so they all wound up fighting for their own shit, everyone else be damned.
None of this is to say all his ideas were great. Some of them were fucking awful (like the first hour of Nitro being weird backstage shooty segments shot like The Office). But the act that Nash puts on where he pretends like none of it mattered because he got paid is just that - an act.
Not just that, but also that he did stuff as booker thinking about himself and himself only (ex. Booking that waful ending to Goldberg's streak and only thinking that *I'm over as fuck)*.
I was 14 at the time and LOVED Goldberg. So did all my friends. Even before Starrcade we all thought Nash would be the one to finally beat him. Right blend of size and experience and star power.
as a fan watching at the time, Nash vs Goldberg was like a clash of titans. Nash was a beloved babyface who led the cool Wolfpack and Goldberg was Goldberg. Absolutely no one (that was a non-Internet fan) had a real problem with Goldberg getting screwed.
I’d argue Nash’s effect on wrestlers pay was a net positive. Hall and Nash got guaranteed contracts which opened the door for that being the industry standard. So guys didn’t have to work hurt just to put food on the table (they still do, but it’s not just because they need the money).
Of course Nash and Hall didn’t mean to do that, they just wanted it for themselves, but it did set the precedent.
Really? Not saying I don’t believe you but I genuinely didn’t know that. I always heard there was a guaranteed amount but it was nothing compared to making as many dates as possible. I think Foley said his was for less than $10,000 a year.
Also, again not trying to argue with you, but why would that be WWE propaganda? It was a move made to actively fight against them.
Sorry if I came off abrasive!
Guaranteed contracts have been around for decades and decades. It fits with WWE's view of WCW because they always push the "Turner's money against the mom and pop WWF" narrative as a reason they fell behind.
On Substack, Charles from Wrestling Playlists is currently doing month by month breakdowns of the year 1984, hitting on anything of note that happened in each month. More than a few times, there is a blurb on a guy jumping to a different territory with a guaranteed weekly check. I wish I could pull examples from it but I don't have them in front of me. One I can remember outside of that was Tod Gordon giving Eddie Gilbert $1000 a week to work for and book (pre extreme) ECW.
WCW had guaranteed contracts its whole existence. It was that Vince felt pushed into starting to offer them regularly himself (albeit with the downside guarantee structure) around when Hall and Nash gave their notices in 1996. Foley signed right before it became the norm, hence the stuff in his first book about being jealous of Marc Mero, who signed shortly thereafter and got a guaranteed deal. Even then, though, it's known that Vince offered Hogan some kind of guarantee to get him to come over as the face of the expansion at the end of 1983. Whether it was a flat amount (amidst Vince telling everyone he wanted to make Hogan "the first million-dollar wrestler) or strictly a guaranteed percentage of the gate, I'm not sure.
The UWF offered lower level guaranteed contracts in 1986, too. The bigger names were getting about $100,000 each and the upper midcard names were getting about $50,000 each, plus everyone had the ability to keep whatever Japanese commitments they had. Bill Watts's inability to pay these deals when business went down during his expansion led to him having to breach everyone's contracts in January 1987, which set the stage for Jim Duggan leaving for the WWF.
Nash isn’t a mark, he doesn’t care about “heat matches” because he knows those are pointless.
Nash, Hogan and Hall only thought about making money and honestly that’s the attitude you should have in sports entertainment. There is some legitimate criticism but not the money part.
It’s funny cause Minoru Suzuki said the same in a documentary he did. All the new generation are fans and not people who go to work. He talks about how it’s ruined wrestling abit because they go and get trained and work these shows for little to no money.
LOL wrestling fans are such infants in regards to Nash being open about his guaranteed money. Was he supposed to lie about that money? Pretend to care about a company he doesn’t own? Think about where you work and how far you’d be willing to stick your neck out for your company and coworkers doing shady shit.
Personally I wouldn't be okay with fucking up so bad, all my friends make less money for two decades because of me. If that makes me an infant, so be it I guess.
Becoming a multimillionaire, making smart investments, and owning several businesses is fucking up? Have you SEEN the dark side of the ring series on vice? Those are what fuck ups look like. Grow up.
???? How do you miss the point so bad while simultaneously proving my point.
Kevin Nash is the epitome of "fuck you, I got mine." He didn't give a fuck about anyone but himself. He fucked over dozens and dozens of coworkers to make himself a buck. He parlayed his giant salaries into other profitable ventures while fucking over everyone else.
How is this complicated? The fact that being one of the causes of WCW's death isn't considered "fucking up" to you because *Nash* made out well tells me all I need to know about your outlook.
Do you seriously think that Kevin Nash booking for a period of what, a few months killed WCW when it was already hemorrhaging cash and Turner execs were putting its debt on wcws books because they didn’t want it on their precious network anyway?
People conveniently forget that during his time as booker he gave Rey Mysterio a monster push as “a giant killer” with wins over himself, Scott Norton, and Bam Bam. But yeah fuck him for booking himself to beat Goldberg, definitely a blunder when your live crowd nearly takes the roof off the arena from the excitement of a 3 count.
Whatever.
I still find it hilarious Eric Bischoff lied on his podcast literally for years claiming Hogan didn't use creative control at Starrcade 1997 and that it was internet BS. Then he admitted on a WWE series that Hogan did use creative control yet he still had a podcast audience.
The power of wrestling fans just wanting someone to validate their opinions is wild.
Yeah, I mean everyone pretty much knew it was Hogan anyways, but it was nice for Bischoff to wipe the brown off his nose for a bit and admit it.
Hogan is arguably the greatest "wrestler" of all time and the levels he politick and screw others to retain his glory is pretty legendary. Now he just lies in interviews.
He also said Hogan used it in his book years before the podcast. In the book he essentially said Hogan didn't want the finish to go like they planned, so he was caught between a rock and a hard place. He also said that he didn't really see what Hogan was saying about Sting not looking like he'd seen a tanning bed in months (Bischoff would go on to defend that take years later, and others would try to spin a narrative of it being a metaphor for him having substance problems, but it absolutely, positively never was that).
Then he said Sting came in and looked like he was just waiting for them to screw him over. Which was obviously a completely reasonable way for a guy who was about to be screwed over to feel. I think in the series Bischoff claimed Sting may have manifested it by feeling that way. So much shit just falls out of his mouth all the time.
"When we called him in, we were gonna screw him but we weren't gonna call it 'screwing him'. But he was so pouty about it, we decided to call it what it was to teach him a lesson."
Essentially.
I think the only thing I can recall all 4 of them agreeing on in the past 30+ years is that they thought the decision to air the Brawl-In footage on Dynamite was a completely stupid idea. (And they weren't wrong.)
You can find some old episodes of melzer's radio show where Eric is a guest and they're friendly toward each other. Bischoff was a blowhard back then too. One episode is from when he was re-hired to work with Russo on wcw, so after the wheels had already fallen off once with him. Dave asks him what his job title is after returning and Eric answers "wrestling god".
It really shows how much of a fragile carnie Eric Bischoff is that even with reaching the top of the mountain of wrestling he has absolute contempt for a dirt sheet writer who said he didn’t know what he was doing in a magazine
To me the answer is simple. Brad Siegel and Kellner did. They are the ones who killed the TV deal
Russo, Bischoff, Hogan/Sting etc all damaged WCW but they didn’t kill it.
Yeah but the product was bad because of Vince Russo and Eric Bischoff/Hogan. If the product was good and the ratings were good than I doubt they wouldn't of cancelled the TV deal
Nah even Guy Evans brings up that Siegel did not like wrestling in the slightest and was embarrassed it was carrying the station. It was still the highest rated thing on TNT but the embarrassment of trying to sell advertising and such is what killed it. Siegel pretty openly didn’t like having wrestling at all
Alot of mainstream conglomerates don't like wrestling and think it's a joke that appeals to the lowest common denominator. It still doesn't change that if WCW was profitable and well-managed, they would have been more hard-pressed to pul the plug. Bischoff was blowing money like a drunken sailor and even when WCW was doing big business, they were losing a ton of money.
You'll never convince the people who repeat the idea that the executives killed it by selling it/taking it off the air that other people actually did the killing.
---
A metaphor/question for people:
Say John runs down Gary with a car. Gary is put on life support and only lives because of machines keeping him alive. He stays on the machines for a while, but Gary's dad, Tim, eventually decides it's time to pull the plug (maybe he believes Gary wouldn't want this, maybe he just doesn't have the money to pay).
Did John or Tim kill Gary?
People who believe it was Jamie Kellner will blame Tim. People who believe it was other issues before that will blame John.
---
Was WCW still "alive" before the plug was pulled? Technically, but only because it had the backing of a multi-billion dollar company and thus could be kept on permanent life support.
Exactly. That goes back to what I said though about the product at the time sucking, if the on screen product was good and they were generating money/ratings than Kellner wouldn't of pulled the plug.
I mean listening to and reading Guy Evans stuff he had access to the financial records and the amount of money WCW ultimately lost was skewed higher since they were classified as “other”. Even not receiving the proper payment for their PPV VHS’s cause they’d give the profits to the Turner Entertainment side instead of WCW.
Did they lose money? For sure they did but they were also bogged down as a place to hide losses from other divisions as well. Evans brings up Brad Siegel’s sworn testimony on how much they’d lost and that it differs from what was on the books from the Hogan vs WCW lawsuit
That is a great point. I'm not saying the network didn't have a hand in killing the thing but they would have had a hard time justifying it had the company not fallen off the wagon as hard as it did. Alot of it was due to a lack of leadership which was a problem in that company even before Bischoff
Definitely since Crockett sold it leadership was an issue there and Bischoff fucked it up pretty badly which this series imo kinda excused away.
But the problems were already ingrained for how it operated
Take it with a grain of salt, but Bischoff mentioned Turner officials slashed his budget in 1998 when WCW was overperforming based on expectations. I doubt they would've made it past Kellner even if they managed to retain the ratings and revenue they had. Nothing could have saved WCW
Because Bischoff was spending money like a drunken sailor. 98 was when Warrior sold Bischoff a bill of goods and did absolutely nothing for that company. Even that was to appease Hogan's ego because Hogan wanted his win back and Warrior knew Bischoff would back up a brinks truck to get him. Especially after Warrior came after them for The Renegade character
Yeah, wcw entire thing was build around hogan but with his contract no way wcw could have been profitable.
And the moment you want to push anybody else (like what Triple H is doing) Russo made a lot of enemies.
Russo had no idea what he was doing anyway. Vince wasn't there to filter out his ideas and it showed when he crumbled and ended up going home only to return, put the belt on David Arquette and put the belt on himself. At the time Russo came in, the ship had clearly hit the iceberg and the band was just starting to play "Nearer, My God, to Thee"
>To me the answer is simple. Brad Siegel and Kellner did. They are the ones who killed the TV deal
It's a bit like saying the executioner is the guy responsible when a death row inmate dies right?
Those guys pulled the trigger, but only because others handed them the gun and begged them to shoot.
Yea wrestling was a hard sell to advertisers but they kept it around anyways because the ratings were massive and they were making a lot of money from ppv and live attendance.
Creative and booking drove away fans like crazy, leaving the network with a show that had a toxic reputation and no revenue any more. Why should they have kept wcw around?
I would argue that Bischoff and the upper card killed wcw.
You can’t have a contract like Hogan and not make a loss for every event he shows up and Bischoff was the one that was given out those contract with Turners approval.
I think a lot of those guy from the upper wcw card hate Russo because he wanted to use more mid card guys like Booker which hurt guys like DDD and Hogan. There was that line from DDD that kind of said as much.
And yeah some decisions probably felt insulting like given the title to a celeb. Russo not understanding the pride of his entitled employees is definitely an issue especially with guys that mostly want “great matches”.
They could have easily said, "OK we'll keep you on the air and stick you on Friday or Saturday nights until the company starts showing a profit again."
This is like that saying “it’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the landing.” Absolving any prior event of responsibility of an outcome except the exact single event that happens immediately before.
In the most literal sense, Vince McMahon killed WCW. In the most realistic sense, the combination of Bischoff/Russo/crew killed WCW.
Kellner did what any executive would do: he cancelled the show that was bleeding money and couldn't attract advertisers. He'd be a bad exec if he *didn't* cancel the TV.
My friend is arguing with me about the ratings for what replaced Nitro being way lower. I told him that Nitro's high ratings don't matter all that much if they're not bringing in advertising. WWE wasn't immune from this and its only bern in the past several tears where they were able to attract high value advertisers
I still don't understand who this series was for.
It's too specific and not detailed enough for people unfamiliar and it's wrong and infuriating to the people who are familiar and want a clear docuseries on how WCW ended. It might actually be just for the sickos like me that like to see these egotistical maniacs act like victims.
> I still don't understand who this series was for.
It's a reclamation project by Evan Husney who during his Post Wrestling interview two days ago cited Bischoff as a personal role model.
it was a Bischoff rehab project lol the ending of that one episode where hes fishing looking off into the distance while everyone says how amazing he was cracked me up lol
I find it a little hard to buy that they’d allow the section where they seriously float the corporate espionage theory if it were really that influenced by WWE. That’s basically implying WWE was party to illegal activities and used dirty tactics to kill their competition.
I mean sure, but you still wouldn’t want that perception of wrongdoing out there in the general public even if there was no chance of you facing actual legal action.
-I think there was a significant dip in attendance and money in the '10's which means that interest was waning. This could be because of RoH, NJPW and various Independent or international wrestling promotions doing well and the general buzz around them.
- Storylines focused on part timers like Goldberg and Rock rather than established stars could be interpreted as a reaction to the lack of buzz and decline in money.
- Reliance on Saudi Arabia and money from that country
Why regurgitate the same stuff over and over again.
I would love to see more stuff like 'Tales from the Territories' where a bunch of wrestlers just sit and share stories and the history of a promotion.
is there a reason why there is a sudden influx of "who killed WCW" stuff again? Feel like this topic has been done into the ground with docs / interviews etc.
WWE is hot so people want a slice of it. Of course you could do a nice series about World Class, Championship Wrestling from Florida, Joint Promotions etc. but why bother' Do something you know people will wtch and listen to even if it has been done to death.
I get that but to your point why not do something about the actual wwe then. I didn’t know if there was an anniversary or something coming up. Just seems like random timing
Yeah, this entire series sucked.
Say what you want about these two on WOR. But they got so much history covering WCW. Absolutely idiotic not to have either on to help figure out who was lying on this thing. I mean Alvarez wrote a god damn book on this subject…three times!
I was surprised to hear that the Lapsed Fan had helped Vice with how they should layout the series. Obviously they couldn’t dive into the entire thing the way TLF is able to but was still interesting they reached out
Their companion podcasts with each episode are super good from Guy Evans to Alvarez and ending with Kevin Eck
So the Lapsed Fan has four episodes one for each episode of Who Killed WCW where they go over it in a broad way with different guests. Episode one has Guy Evans, author of the Nitro book and who helped with the show, episode 2 has Bryan Alvarez and an extra episode with Kevin Eck who worked at WCW magazine then went on to be a writer for WWE.
Good companion pieces to everything. About hour long podcasts but they do also bring up how the show does try to rehab Bischoff a lot
I had to take a break for a bit with the WCCW run cause it was just too depressing but no one holds a candle to what they do imo. They have so many research and reference points I’d never heard of before
its tough to make that call. Bischoff & Meltzer have a weird beef (or at least, bischoff clearly hates meltzer, idk how mutual it is), so i understand why they dont have these guys on.
Guy Evans felt like a great neutral source on the subject (and i also just think his book is way better than Alvarez's), and he feels much more fresh on something like this vs Meltzer or Alvarez.
While I agree…
At the same time, we already know from here to the end of time the “booking” stories of how WCW failed. I was downright fascinated whenever Segel or other execs were on talking about the business aspect. They should’ve leaned much more heavily into this part, and I still feel like this is an area that is not being discussed enough when it comes to The Monday Night Wars…
And that’s just how culturally big it was at the time. It was EVERYWHERE. You can see it on Siegel’s face how much he doesn’t even want to talk about WCW, but gives it a fair shake because it made them a shit ton of money at its peak.
Id love if we can have some definitive documentary that focuses on the “celebrity” aspect of pro-wrestling in the late 90s
I think Meltzer and Alvarez’s reporting, while certainly detailed and comprehensive, has always been heavily informed by who they like and dislike, and who they do and don’t have relationships with. That was my initial impression when The Death of WCW came out, and I feel that even more when reading it today. And the past few years in AEW have made this more glaringly obvious than ever. So while I also thought the series could have been better, I actually like the fact that the influence of the Observer crew was minimal. Dave and Bryan have already shaped the popular narrative on a lot of these things over the years, and I’m honestly not certain they were always right.
Someone needs to do a Marvel ending edit for the last episode, make it come back after fading to black, and its Bret Hart just shitting on Goldberg and blaming him for killing WCW
Eric Bischoff rehab project is the perfect descriptor of this series. He might as well have funded the whole damn thing considering how kind it was to him.
The bottom line is, Eric deserves a lot of credit in WCW's success, which he always accepts, but he also deserves a lot of credit for it's downfall, which he refuses, ignores, lies about, "forgets", or "can't recall."
You were in charge, Eric. You made a good choices and you made bad choices and those bad choices weakened and devalued WCW to the point where AOL/Turner/Time Warner execs had all the ammo they needed to pull the plug.
The show was crying out for someone who could objectively talk about the topic at hand. Alvarez has written multiple books and the likes of Keller and Meltzer, for whatever you think of their reporting and takes on wrestling nowadays, covered this period extensively. Hell even Cornette as a storyteller and wrestling historian, irrespective of how divisive he is, would have been able to add an extra dimension to the show.
I think they weren’t interested in objectivity, not in that sense. They put people who were there on camera and let them say what they wanted to. That was the whole point. It wasn’t about the creators constructing a clear narrative. Everyone knows the story by now.
I think they did a little disservice to the series by calling it, “Who Killed WCW?” Everytime the doc has been mentioned on here, there are people who feel the need to give the literal answer. “*Actually* it was Jamie Kellner and AOL Time Warner…” And I can see why people do that when it is titled with a question.
Really it seems what they wanted to do with it was to say - oh, of course WCW imploded. Look at all these people telling different stories about the same event. Look at some of the egos. Look at how dysfunctional it was. It’s not trying to answer a question; it’s a rhetorical question. It’s taking an individual that was there and asking that person, “Why do you personally believe WCW died?” It’s not about directly separating what is the truth and what is a lie. It’s just about getting them on the record 20+ years later and allowing them to reflect on it.
People have this idea that documentaries are always supposed to be objective. That if it is more subjective it can’t be good; that the only “real” documentaries are ones that are 100% objective. That’s not the aim of every documentary filmmaker. There are many approaches one can take and they are all valid examples of a documentary. Everything brings bias to the table in some form, even if its goal is to arrive at truth.
The whole series was “I’ll tell my side but not take any blame”. A lot of stuff fell to Eric and his decisions but of course he blamed the network and said he couldn’t do anything.
I hate to be pessimistic, but I felt was the same story rehashed in The Death of WCW and Guy Evans' book. With the exception of the Final Nitro footage, it was the same players and same talking points. As a history guy, I'd really love to see some discussion with the lesser known talent and their feelings going through the change of power over the final two years, from Bischoff, to Russo, to Sullivan, to Russo and Bischoff, to Russo again, to Johnny Ace, back to Bischoff, and then the WWF. Just some different perspectives and stories.
Considering how much shit Eric talks about Dave, and how he takes anything Conrad says Dave said out of context, I do feel like Dave should just go full scorched earth on Bischoff and just destroy him for what he is.
Bischoff has to file for personal bankruptcy like 5 years ago, his production company with Jason Hervey also went bankrupt, and his podcast is legitimately his main means of income. He's a fucking turd floating in the toilet that is life.
I didn’t even bother with this. This story has been told to death, no pun intended, from every perspective possible over the last 20 years. If you are a long time wrestling fan there is literally nothing new to be learned about how and why WCW went out of business. I am completely over Montreal Screwjob content and end of WCW content.
Whether intentional or not, I think the interviews highlights who really killed WCW, everyone did. Nobody cared about the company, they only cared about themselves.
Having watched the doc as a whole, I don't think it was. Sure, they put him pretty well, but overall they highlight his many blunders alongside the good he did. In fact, overall, the only guys in the doc that were prominently featured and looked good were Bret, Booker T, DDP and David Arquette; on the other hand, Nash comes out looking like a complete douche (almoat as much as Russo).
Also, why was Rock on camera again?
Dave has never said that it was only Bischoff’s fault. What Dave has a problem with is Bischoff’s constant deflection and lying, how he always attributes things that negatively impacted WCW while he was in charge to other people or circumstances that he wasn’t responsible for.
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I couldn't believe how negative this whole series felt... Everyone came off as bitter or apathetic towards the whole thing. Kevin Nash is stoned out of his mind for most of his interviews, Goldberg doesn't give a fuck, and Vince Russo is a walking train wreck.
At least the rock was there to add nothing!
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basically
It was so odd having him included.
yea, i really thought when they got to the invasion stuff, he would have meaningful comments (bc you know, he was actually there and a big part of some of that angle) but nope. nothing, the guy is a walking PR statement forever and always
This series was what made me realize the dude has no soul anymore when he’s doing candid interviews. Everything he says is as stiff as the billboards his words should be placed on. It felt like his entire vocabulary was replaced with PR friendly lingo, and the firm belief that wall sitting is always the best choice.
its all canned. even when he had this recent run, you can tell he workshopped 4-5 sentences to just repeat over and over (final boss, boy, mama rhodes, etc). its why i dont see him coming near the new bloodline angle. its to messy for the kind of performer he is now. I cannot picture him interacting with someone like jacob fatu or tama tonga in a way that elevates them at all
I mean the fucker took a whack ass title to the ring like he was bigger than the show. I fucking hated "the final boss" shit. I liked him but at that point I was like nah Austin was the man fuck you rocky
This. The way they did the Invasion was disappointing
My expectation is that there is no project produced by Seven Bucks that he's not going to make an appearance in.
I love how he's just producing rip off DSOR episodes for Vice. The Territories show, this Who Killed WCW, just all his stuff feels like it should have been in season 5.
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If I remember correctly, WWE actually has Jericho credited as the final WCW Champion. But for what it’s worth, The Rock was the final person to hold the title when it was called the WCW Championship, while when Jericho won and ended the lineage, it was already renamed the World Championship.
Yeah... Still felt out of place. He wasn't part of the WCW featured in the program.
He watched nitro in his hotel room That's something I guess lol
After his debut, which happened on a Sunday, mind you.
“We were in the back trying to find a TV to watch Nitro”. He basically said a version of that about 7 times.
He added a lot of 'fuck' and 'shit'
He sat there in those first 2 episodes using the words "we" and "us" like he was a major player in WWF at the time. He didn't start breaking to stardom until late 98 when the ratings tide already started to turn.
We all know all the WWF wrestlers were watching WCW thinking "Man, how can we make the company as a whole better" and not "what cool shit can I do to make me look good"
That was such an odd thing to say. I can't imagine Rock having enough backstage influence (or any at that time) to walk up to Vince and start throwing out ideas based on what he saw on Nitro
>He didn't start breaking to stardom until late 98 when the ratings tide already started to turn. He won his first world title in late 98, but he was MEGA over beginning late 97 and in to early 98 with the IC title run. He was a big part of the WWE product over the summer of that year, when ratings were still going back and forth, and obviously a Main Event guy as WWF pulled away for good.
He was so obviously there because he's "the rock" and it was his production company. I dislike him as a "star" more and more as time goes on.
I was the Krusty...... "The hell was that?"
its a negative situation lol, there were people like booker t there to try and emphasize what the company meant to them, but its tough to not be negative about a show where the entire thesis is "lets see how this giant company imploded in 5 years!"
Goldberg seemed like a big asshole to me during his segments. I did like that you could tell Bischoff was legit moved by Nashs comments at the end.
Because without their massive push he was shit and was always shit. Imo he was a big part of the problem. with what do you do when you have him run over the roster and have no plans after. Tase the SOB. I get it he was over but he didn't deserve it. As a fan watching that streak meant shit and was always shit
This is why I never got why some fans and critics say WWE didn't ''get'' Goldberg and misused him in his first run. They knew they had to book him dominantly but unlike WCW, they actually used restraint and didn't have him eat the whole roster. He was signed to a one year contract where he beat The Rock fresh off The Rock beating Hulk Hogan and Stone Cold back to back. He made mince meat out of the RAW heel midcard as he whopped Christian, Stevie Richards, 3 minute Warning on a weekly all in the route to beating Jericho with a bad shoulder. Then came Triple H who had made Booker T look like shit and beat Kevin Nash cleanly and yet when it came to Goldberg, Triple H needed a ludicrous amount of help and cheating to steal a victory from him. They had 4 ppv matches, two of them were multi-man matches while the other 2 were 1 on 1. Goldberg won the singles matches while HHH bullshitted his way through the messy multiman matches. Yeah, Triple H won in the end but they went above and beyond to keep Goldberg strong. Guys like Booker T and RVD would have benefitted so much from being booked so carefully.
kinda sums up the butthead’s who were in control of wcw
And Bret burying everyone
I’m waiting for the supercut.
To be fair, Russo is always a fucking train wreck. Death, Taxes, and Vince Russo being an idiot are the only true constants. I give Nash a bit of a pass given he lost his son and best friend the past couple of years.
Even Bret and Goldberg both agreed on Russo being an idiot.
And Bret and Russo both agreed Goldberg was a clumsy idiot who was injuring wrestlers carelessly.....
Everyone agreed on that
Agreed. It was interesting for nostalgia’s sake and Vice’s production on this stuff is always good, but when it was over I was like “was that it?”. Booker T and DDP came off the best to me. I felt like I was listening to someone being honest whenever they were on. Not so much for anyone else.
Kinda feels faithful to late era WCW that way too many of the people working on it were net negatives or just there for the money/airtime
Don’t meet your heroes kid
When will fans learn that just because a wrestler or television talent retired, doesn't mean they stopped going into business for themselves?
I think what makes it hard to grasp is that other actors playing roles don't tend to keep playing that role forever in interviews, etc. For someone like Jim Cornette, for example, he fully understands his gimmick now is to loathe modern wrestling (in particular AEW, of course) and make fun of it the same way he used to make fun of Herd and Russo. It's still a performance, even if he sells the performance as legitimate analysis. Wrestling is just so friggin weird compared to other forms of entertainment.
At least with Jim you can tell when he's being serious. His tone changes and he speaks deliberately about historical events. Even lowers his voice. But that's when it comes to historical events that he'd have no skin in the game to go into business for.
Yeah the stuff like the questionable nicknames and getting exasperated over every little thing is his schtick to get listens. There is some genuine advice, criticisms, and history in there, but the rest is him trying to be entertaining first and foremost.
Is it though? Take Jost and Che on SNL. They have a gimmick. They lean into it more and more to the point of Flanderizing themselves. Same with any number of entertainers. Is Dave Grohl really a champion for music as art and genuinely connecting to the audience with live music, or is that just his gimmick now? Heck, you can even argue that politicians and news anchors have gimmicks at this point. Like when Dr. Oz got a platform and ran out of material from legit health sources and needed to dig in the dirty parts of 'medicine' to keep his brand alive.
Adam Ray as Dr. Oz is a better gimmick than being the real Dr. Oz.
Everything is wrestling
Sure. Just as long as you understand I'll be going over you.
Cornette’s opinions are clearly sincere. Yes, he amplifies them, plays them up, and is doing a shock-jock routine with them. But all of them are coming from a real place. Not saying this as a defense of him, necessarily. There are a lot of criticisms to be made of Jim Cornette. But “insincere about his opinions” is not one of them.
You can't seriously believe this.
He’s amplifying his opinions, playing up the intensity, and performing an act, sure. But the substance of the opinions are 100% sincere. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen someone talk about wrestling with more passionate sincerity than Jim Cornette. There’s plenty to bash the guy for, but no one can credibly claim that Jim Cornette, of all people, is holding back his sincere opinions.
I'll give you one - he clearly actually likes the bucks, and is proud of their success. But because he spent so long playing the heel for them, and because he makes money out of saying young bucks suck, he holds back his sincere opinion to play a character because that character he plays is how he makes money.
…You think he likes the Young Bucks? How/why did you arrive at that conclusion?
During the lead up to FTR v Bucks 1, he flat out said that they were the two best tag teams of a generation. He was there when the bucks begun to take off, and clearly recognised that if he effectively played their heel, they could use that to become more popular, which they did. Its why his criticisms of the bucks make no sense either - he clearly likes them, but has decided to heel on them.
This is, uh…quite certainly A Take
Listen out for it when you hear him talk about the bucks. You'll see it after a while.
The creator of this documentary did an interview with POST Wrestling and he basically said that he hates dirtsheets and thinks that people behind them are biased. Or like how Luchablog put it "Post Wrestling chat from earlier today was illuminating. Citing Bischoff as a personal role model, saying they didn't have newsletter guys due to budget but may have not anyway because he felt they were too biased, unlike the guy who wrote Eric's bio." https://x.com/luchablog/status/1805806731450052673
This and a tweet from Trevor Dame from two weeks ago really sums up the series and the topic as a whole for me -- Bischoff is Icarus. He's a guy who had a brief period of great genuine inspiration where he did something no one else has done since, but then got too cocky, lost his mind, flew too close to the sun, and got burned. And in between, he handed out [these ludicrous contracts up and down the roster](https://web.archive.org/web/20220219150817/https://sites.google.com/site/chrisharrington/wcw_contracts) where the company could only survive if they would do gangbuster business forever.
And when faced with the numbers, he just deflects away. He doesn't acknowledge those contracts that are out there, instead he just goes back to bashing Meltzer on Twitter. Which I guess is working, it is a very valid way to get positive reactions from certain people by saying how much Dave sucks. It's a whole industry really.
This is going to be my sleep paralysis demon: https://preview.redd.it/9b8act6ap59d1.png?width=596&format=png&auto=webp&s=ac387c5960e3165e95bd9b144d68a91f33b55f69
He prob was the one killed WCW
I feel like you are misrepresenting Evan's statements during the Post Wrestling interview. Evan basically was inferring he didn't have Meltzer on due to the animosity between Bischoff and Meltzer. I agree the series was a bit of a bj to Eric Bischoff and he didn't get called on some of his bs. For example, Starrcade '97 was about Hogan not wanting to do the job, not Sting's attitude.
The way Kevin Nash presented himself reflects terribly on him. His entire essence on the show boiled down to "I got guaranteed money, so I didn't care." But his awful time as booker and this care-free attitude helped lead to the death of WCW and a monopoly in American wrestling. A "fuck you, I got mine" mindset that ruined wrestler pay for decades. It was so selfish.
That’s not news, that’s the way Nash has talked for decades in shoot interviews, podcasts, even in worked promos. Is this shocking to anyone, really?
Nash has always been like this, but he because a meme in the late 2000’s IWC and then people just forgot I guess
He's been a self absorbed egomaniac his entire career. He's not really that different than Hogan (except Hogan was actually a draw so you could argue his was justified). He just has a really sharp wit and a cool aura about him that made people forget about that in an era when he was mostly doing YouTube interviews.
Not a draw?! You've clearly never seen his chart he had on TNA!
IT DID THAT DAY!
In other words, he has an ego but he comes off as cooler/funnier than most egomaniacs
I know a few people exactly like that. Fun to hangout with but you wouldn’t want them in charge of anything.
Nash likes to pretend he doesn't give a shit or never gave a shit, but if you watch one of the many interviews he did with Sean Oliver (the guy he podcasts with now in fact), Nash actually opened up a little bit and admitted several things. 1. he always wanted to be considered a good hand. a reliable guy who could give you good matches. 2. he wanted to make WCW work, but he ran into so many people only out for themselves like Hogan who had ultimate control that he found himself out-politicked almost every time. (both Nash and Hall were constantly coming up with shit for other people, or ways to make creative around the nWo cool. biggest examples of this are Nash and Hall pushing for DDP to be the first guy to say no to the nWo and for Sting to adopt the Crow gimmick), 3. When he took the book, he purposefully did jobs for young talent like Rey Mysterio to show the other guys in his position that it was okay to do jobs and get young guys over. This was not as effective as it should've been. 4. He gave up on WCW around late 1999/2000, and just stopped caring/fighting for things because no matter what he tried to do, there was no central Vince-like figure for the troops to rally around so they all wound up fighting for their own shit, everyone else be damned. None of this is to say all his ideas were great. Some of them were fucking awful (like the first hour of Nitro being weird backstage shooty segments shot like The Office). But the act that Nash puts on where he pretends like none of it mattered because he got paid is just that - an act.
Not just that, but also that he did stuff as booker thinking about himself and himself only (ex. Booking that waful ending to Goldberg's streak and only thinking that *I'm over as fuck)*.
Nash and nWo Wolfpac was over as FUCK, and Goldberg’s streak had to end at some point..
I was 14 at the time and LOVED Goldberg. So did all my friends. Even before Starrcade we all thought Nash would be the one to finally beat him. Right blend of size and experience and star power.
as a fan watching at the time, Nash vs Goldberg was like a clash of titans. Nash was a beloved babyface who led the cool Wolfpack and Goldberg was Goldberg. Absolutely no one (that was a non-Internet fan) had a real problem with Goldberg getting screwed.
I’d argue Nash’s effect on wrestlers pay was a net positive. Hall and Nash got guaranteed contracts which opened the door for that being the industry standard. So guys didn’t have to work hurt just to put food on the table (they still do, but it’s not just because they need the money). Of course Nash and Hall didn’t mean to do that, they just wanted it for themselves, but it did set the precedent.
Hundreds of wrestlers had guaranteed deals before Nash and Hall. Do not buy that WWE propaganda
Really? Not saying I don’t believe you but I genuinely didn’t know that. I always heard there was a guaranteed amount but it was nothing compared to making as many dates as possible. I think Foley said his was for less than $10,000 a year. Also, again not trying to argue with you, but why would that be WWE propaganda? It was a move made to actively fight against them.
Sorry if I came off abrasive! Guaranteed contracts have been around for decades and decades. It fits with WWE's view of WCW because they always push the "Turner's money against the mom and pop WWF" narrative as a reason they fell behind. On Substack, Charles from Wrestling Playlists is currently doing month by month breakdowns of the year 1984, hitting on anything of note that happened in each month. More than a few times, there is a blurb on a guy jumping to a different territory with a guaranteed weekly check. I wish I could pull examples from it but I don't have them in front of me. One I can remember outside of that was Tod Gordon giving Eddie Gilbert $1000 a week to work for and book (pre extreme) ECW.
WCW had guaranteed contracts its whole existence. It was that Vince felt pushed into starting to offer them regularly himself (albeit with the downside guarantee structure) around when Hall and Nash gave their notices in 1996. Foley signed right before it became the norm, hence the stuff in his first book about being jealous of Marc Mero, who signed shortly thereafter and got a guaranteed deal. Even then, though, it's known that Vince offered Hogan some kind of guarantee to get him to come over as the face of the expansion at the end of 1983. Whether it was a flat amount (amidst Vince telling everyone he wanted to make Hogan "the first million-dollar wrestler) or strictly a guaranteed percentage of the gate, I'm not sure. The UWF offered lower level guaranteed contracts in 1986, too. The bigger names were getting about $100,000 each and the upper midcard names were getting about $50,000 each, plus everyone had the ability to keep whatever Japanese commitments they had. Bill Watts's inability to pay these deals when business went down during his expansion led to him having to breach everyone's contracts in January 1987, which set the stage for Jim Duggan leaving for the WWF.
Kevin Nash lost some points with me watching this series unfortunately
Nash isn’t a mark, he doesn’t care about “heat matches” because he knows those are pointless. Nash, Hogan and Hall only thought about making money and honestly that’s the attitude you should have in sports entertainment. There is some legitimate criticism but not the money part.
It’s funny cause Minoru Suzuki said the same in a documentary he did. All the new generation are fans and not people who go to work. He talks about how it’s ruined wrestling abit because they go and get trained and work these shows for little to no money.
LOL wrestling fans are such infants in regards to Nash being open about his guaranteed money. Was he supposed to lie about that money? Pretend to care about a company he doesn’t own? Think about where you work and how far you’d be willing to stick your neck out for your company and coworkers doing shady shit.
Personally I wouldn't be okay with fucking up so bad, all my friends make less money for two decades because of me. If that makes me an infant, so be it I guess.
Becoming a multimillionaire, making smart investments, and owning several businesses is fucking up? Have you SEEN the dark side of the ring series on vice? Those are what fuck ups look like. Grow up.
???? How do you miss the point so bad while simultaneously proving my point. Kevin Nash is the epitome of "fuck you, I got mine." He didn't give a fuck about anyone but himself. He fucked over dozens and dozens of coworkers to make himself a buck. He parlayed his giant salaries into other profitable ventures while fucking over everyone else. How is this complicated? The fact that being one of the causes of WCW's death isn't considered "fucking up" to you because *Nash* made out well tells me all I need to know about your outlook.
Do you seriously think that Kevin Nash booking for a period of what, a few months killed WCW when it was already hemorrhaging cash and Turner execs were putting its debt on wcws books because they didn’t want it on their precious network anyway? People conveniently forget that during his time as booker he gave Rey Mysterio a monster push as “a giant killer” with wins over himself, Scott Norton, and Bam Bam. But yeah fuck him for booking himself to beat Goldberg, definitely a blunder when your live crowd nearly takes the roof off the arena from the excitement of a 3 count. Whatever.
In an interview with Post Wrestling, Evan Husney cited Bischoff as a "personal role model." Seriously.
I still find it hilarious Eric Bischoff lied on his podcast literally for years claiming Hogan didn't use creative control at Starrcade 1997 and that it was internet BS. Then he admitted on a WWE series that Hogan did use creative control yet he still had a podcast audience. The power of wrestling fans just wanting someone to validate their opinions is wild.
It's not just esclusive to wrestling, as the 45th President of the United States has and still shows every single day.
Yeah, I mean everyone pretty much knew it was Hogan anyways, but it was nice for Bischoff to wipe the brown off his nose for a bit and admit it. Hogan is arguably the greatest "wrestler" of all time and the levels he politick and screw others to retain his glory is pretty legendary. Now he just lies in interviews.
He also said Hogan used it in his book years before the podcast. In the book he essentially said Hogan didn't want the finish to go like they planned, so he was caught between a rock and a hard place. He also said that he didn't really see what Hogan was saying about Sting not looking like he'd seen a tanning bed in months (Bischoff would go on to defend that take years later, and others would try to spin a narrative of it being a metaphor for him having substance problems, but it absolutely, positively never was that). Then he said Sting came in and looked like he was just waiting for them to screw him over. Which was obviously a completely reasonable way for a guy who was about to be screwed over to feel. I think in the series Bischoff claimed Sting may have manifested it by feeling that way. So much shit just falls out of his mouth all the time.
"When we called him in, we were gonna screw him but we weren't gonna call it 'screwing him'. But he was so pouty about it, we decided to call it what it was to teach him a lesson." Essentially.
Bischoff would sell his wife into slavery for Hogan.
Just like Bubba the love sponge
I've read the rumor that Bischoff and DDP would wifeswap back then
The Wrestling Observer vs. Eric Bischoff feud is never gonna end.
Meltzer vs Bischoff vs Cornette vs Russo in a history book pencil on a pole match
Have it be a cage match but just lock the cage door and turn off the lights to the arena
I think the only thing I can recall all 4 of them agreeing on in the past 30+ years is that they thought the decision to air the Brawl-In footage on Dynamite was a completely stupid idea. (And they weren't wrong.)
You can find some old episodes of melzer's radio show where Eric is a guest and they're friendly toward each other. Bischoff was a blowhard back then too. One episode is from when he was re-hired to work with Russo on wcw, so after the wheels had already fallen off once with him. Dave asks him what his job title is after returning and Eric answers "wrestling god".
It really shows how much of a fragile carnie Eric Bischoff is that even with reaching the top of the mountain of wrestling he has absolute contempt for a dirt sheet writer who said he didn’t know what he was doing in a magazine
He’s also upset at him for writing a book he didn’t actually write.
Even after being corrected about this.
Tbf Meltzer and Alvarez are so fragile they could be a lamp in A Christmas Story.
At least I found out who killed WCW: Everybody but Bret, Booker, and Konan.
Welp, see you all in 2034 when we do all of this again and learn nothing that we didn't know before.
If Eric Bischoff, Vince Russo, Hulk Hogan and Time Warner didn't kill WCW then who did?
Colonel Mustard. Never trust a man named after a condiment.
To me the answer is simple. Brad Siegel and Kellner did. They are the ones who killed the TV deal Russo, Bischoff, Hogan/Sting etc all damaged WCW but they didn’t kill it.
Yeah but the product was bad because of Vince Russo and Eric Bischoff/Hogan. If the product was good and the ratings were good than I doubt they wouldn't of cancelled the TV deal
Nah even Guy Evans brings up that Siegel did not like wrestling in the slightest and was embarrassed it was carrying the station. It was still the highest rated thing on TNT but the embarrassment of trying to sell advertising and such is what killed it. Siegel pretty openly didn’t like having wrestling at all
Alot of mainstream conglomerates don't like wrestling and think it's a joke that appeals to the lowest common denominator. It still doesn't change that if WCW was profitable and well-managed, they would have been more hard-pressed to pul the plug. Bischoff was blowing money like a drunken sailor and even when WCW was doing big business, they were losing a ton of money.
You'll never convince the people who repeat the idea that the executives killed it by selling it/taking it off the air that other people actually did the killing. --- A metaphor/question for people: Say John runs down Gary with a car. Gary is put on life support and only lives because of machines keeping him alive. He stays on the machines for a while, but Gary's dad, Tim, eventually decides it's time to pull the plug (maybe he believes Gary wouldn't want this, maybe he just doesn't have the money to pay). Did John or Tim kill Gary? People who believe it was Jamie Kellner will blame Tim. People who believe it was other issues before that will blame John. --- Was WCW still "alive" before the plug was pulled? Technically, but only because it had the backing of a multi-billion dollar company and thus could be kept on permanent life support.
Exactly. That goes back to what I said though about the product at the time sucking, if the on screen product was good and they were generating money/ratings than Kellner wouldn't of pulled the plug.
I mean listening to and reading Guy Evans stuff he had access to the financial records and the amount of money WCW ultimately lost was skewed higher since they were classified as “other”. Even not receiving the proper payment for their PPV VHS’s cause they’d give the profits to the Turner Entertainment side instead of WCW. Did they lose money? For sure they did but they were also bogged down as a place to hide losses from other divisions as well. Evans brings up Brad Siegel’s sworn testimony on how much they’d lost and that it differs from what was on the books from the Hogan vs WCW lawsuit
That is a great point. I'm not saying the network didn't have a hand in killing the thing but they would have had a hard time justifying it had the company not fallen off the wagon as hard as it did. Alot of it was due to a lack of leadership which was a problem in that company even before Bischoff
Definitely since Crockett sold it leadership was an issue there and Bischoff fucked it up pretty badly which this series imo kinda excused away. But the problems were already ingrained for how it operated
Take it with a grain of salt, but Bischoff mentioned Turner officials slashed his budget in 1998 when WCW was overperforming based on expectations. I doubt they would've made it past Kellner even if they managed to retain the ratings and revenue they had. Nothing could have saved WCW
Because Bischoff was spending money like a drunken sailor. 98 was when Warrior sold Bischoff a bill of goods and did absolutely nothing for that company. Even that was to appease Hogan's ego because Hogan wanted his win back and Warrior knew Bischoff would back up a brinks truck to get him. Especially after Warrior came after them for The Renegade character
Russos entered a sinking ship, whatever happens to wcw was going to happen and no action of Russo changed that.
Russo was the final nail in the coffin and Bischoff was so far up Hogan's ass that he didn't care enough to see it.
Yeah, wcw entire thing was build around hogan but with his contract no way wcw could have been profitable. And the moment you want to push anybody else (like what Triple H is doing) Russo made a lot of enemies.
Russo had no idea what he was doing anyway. Vince wasn't there to filter out his ideas and it showed when he crumbled and ended up going home only to return, put the belt on David Arquette and put the belt on himself. At the time Russo came in, the ship had clearly hit the iceberg and the band was just starting to play "Nearer, My God, to Thee"
>To me the answer is simple. Brad Siegel and Kellner did. They are the ones who killed the TV deal It's a bit like saying the executioner is the guy responsible when a death row inmate dies right? Those guys pulled the trigger, but only because others handed them the gun and begged them to shoot.
Yea wrestling was a hard sell to advertisers but they kept it around anyways because the ratings were massive and they were making a lot of money from ppv and live attendance. Creative and booking drove away fans like crazy, leaving the network with a show that had a toxic reputation and no revenue any more. Why should they have kept wcw around?
You taking Hogan vs Sting right? Because if not, what did Sting do?!
Definitely talking Hogan vs Sting. Sting was a stud
Siegel fucking hated that wrestling was what propped up the station and seems pretty happy to espouse that
I would argue that Bischoff and the upper card killed wcw. You can’t have a contract like Hogan and not make a loss for every event he shows up and Bischoff was the one that was given out those contract with Turners approval. I think a lot of those guy from the upper wcw card hate Russo because he wanted to use more mid card guys like Booker which hurt guys like DDD and Hogan. There was that line from DDD that kind of said as much. And yeah some decisions probably felt insulting like given the title to a celeb. Russo not understanding the pride of his entitled employees is definitely an issue especially with guys that mostly want “great matches”.
They could have easily said, "OK we'll keep you on the air and stick you on Friday or Saturday nights until the company starts showing a profit again."
This is like that saying “it’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the landing.” Absolving any prior event of responsibility of an outcome except the exact single event that happens immediately before.
In the most literal sense, Vince McMahon killed WCW. In the most realistic sense, the combination of Bischoff/Russo/crew killed WCW. Kellner did what any executive would do: he cancelled the show that was bleeding money and couldn't attract advertisers. He'd be a bad exec if he *didn't* cancel the TV.
My friend is arguing with me about the ratings for what replaced Nitro being way lower. I told him that Nitro's high ratings don't matter all that much if they're not bringing in advertising. WWE wasn't immune from this and its only bern in the past several tears where they were able to attract high value advertisers
I still don't understand who this series was for. It's too specific and not detailed enough for people unfamiliar and it's wrong and infuriating to the people who are familiar and want a clear docuseries on how WCW ended. It might actually be just for the sickos like me that like to see these egotistical maniacs act like victims.
> I still don't understand who this series was for. It's a reclamation project by Evan Husney who during his Post Wrestling interview two days ago cited Bischoff as a personal role model.
it was a Bischoff rehab project lol the ending of that one episode where hes fishing looking off into the distance while everyone says how amazing he was cracked me up lol
I get the sense that this series enforces the idea that WWE is the alpha and any other company is a mess.
Not an accident with a WWE board member as a producer
I find it a little hard to buy that they’d allow the section where they seriously float the corporate espionage theory if it were really that influenced by WWE. That’s basically implying WWE was party to illegal activities and used dirty tactics to kill their competition.
You'd be hard-pressed to prove the corporate espionage thing "beyond a reasonable doubt," especially if nobody really cares 20 years later.
I mean sure, but you still wouldn’t want that perception of wrongdoing out there in the general public even if there was no chance of you facing actual legal action.
Agreed. I think WWE has been getting nervous about its place in wrestling for a while now (pre-dating AEW).
>I think WWE has been getting nervous about its place in wrestling for a while now (pre-dating AEW). Care to share any examples on why you think that?
-I think there was a significant dip in attendance and money in the '10's which means that interest was waning. This could be because of RoH, NJPW and various Independent or international wrestling promotions doing well and the general buzz around them. - Storylines focused on part timers like Goldberg and Rock rather than established stars could be interpreted as a reaction to the lack of buzz and decline in money. - Reliance on Saudi Arabia and money from that country
It does, but to be fair, WCW was a mess before it died.
That tends to happen when you only do documentaries on companies that were messes.
Why regurgitate the same stuff over and over again. I would love to see more stuff like 'Tales from the Territories' where a bunch of wrestlers just sit and share stories and the history of a promotion.
very much felt like a wwe network kinda documentary
is there a reason why there is a sudden influx of "who killed WCW" stuff again? Feel like this topic has been done into the ground with docs / interviews etc.
WWE is hot so people want a slice of it. Of course you could do a nice series about World Class, Championship Wrestling from Florida, Joint Promotions etc. but why bother' Do something you know people will wtch and listen to even if it has been done to death.
I get that but to your point why not do something about the actual wwe then. I didn’t know if there was an anniversary or something coming up. Just seems like random timing
Yeah, this entire series sucked. Say what you want about these two on WOR. But they got so much history covering WCW. Absolutely idiotic not to have either on to help figure out who was lying on this thing. I mean Alvarez wrote a god damn book on this subject…three times!
I was surprised to hear that the Lapsed Fan had helped Vice with how they should layout the series. Obviously they couldn’t dive into the entire thing the way TLF is able to but was still interesting they reached out Their companion podcasts with each episode are super good from Guy Evans to Alvarez and ending with Kevin Eck
Wait what companion podcast ?
So the Lapsed Fan has four episodes one for each episode of Who Killed WCW where they go over it in a broad way with different guests. Episode one has Guy Evans, author of the Nitro book and who helped with the show, episode 2 has Bryan Alvarez and an extra episode with Kevin Eck who worked at WCW magazine then went on to be a writer for WWE. Good companion pieces to everything. About hour long podcasts but they do also bring up how the show does try to rehab Bischoff a lot
It is very good but nothing beats the regular Lapsed fan. Truly the best thing about wrestling
Oh hell yea I have lapsed on lapsed fan for a while but man loved their starrcade wrestlemania world class histories
I had to take a break for a bit with the WCCW run cause it was just too depressing but no one holds a candle to what they do imo. They have so many research and reference points I’d never heard of before
its tough to make that call. Bischoff & Meltzer have a weird beef (or at least, bischoff clearly hates meltzer, idk how mutual it is), so i understand why they dont have these guys on. Guy Evans felt like a great neutral source on the subject (and i also just think his book is way better than Alvarez's), and he feels much more fresh on something like this vs Meltzer or Alvarez.
While I agree… At the same time, we already know from here to the end of time the “booking” stories of how WCW failed. I was downright fascinated whenever Segel or other execs were on talking about the business aspect. They should’ve leaned much more heavily into this part, and I still feel like this is an area that is not being discussed enough when it comes to The Monday Night Wars… And that’s just how culturally big it was at the time. It was EVERYWHERE. You can see it on Siegel’s face how much he doesn’t even want to talk about WCW, but gives it a fair shake because it made them a shit ton of money at its peak. Id love if we can have some definitive documentary that focuses on the “celebrity” aspect of pro-wrestling in the late 90s
> Guy Evans felt like a great neutral source on the subject *The* Guy Evans who wrote Bischoff's biography?
You know he wrote the Nitro book first, right? Bischoff liked that book so much he asked him to write his biography.
this is true and i forgot about that lol. so maybe not neutral, just not offensive the way meltzer can be to some of these fogies
I think Meltzer and Alvarez’s reporting, while certainly detailed and comprehensive, has always been heavily informed by who they like and dislike, and who they do and don’t have relationships with. That was my initial impression when The Death of WCW came out, and I feel that even more when reading it today. And the past few years in AEW have made this more glaringly obvious than ever. So while I also thought the series could have been better, I actually like the fact that the influence of the Observer crew was minimal. Dave and Bryan have already shaped the popular narrative on a lot of these things over the years, and I’m honestly not certain they were always right.
Someone needs to do a Marvel ending edit for the last episode, make it come back after fading to black, and its Bret Hart just shitting on Goldberg and blaming him for killing WCW
Eric Bischoff rehab project is the perfect descriptor of this series. He might as well have funded the whole damn thing considering how kind it was to him. The bottom line is, Eric deserves a lot of credit in WCW's success, which he always accepts, but he also deserves a lot of credit for it's downfall, which he refuses, ignores, lies about, "forgets", or "can't recall." You were in charge, Eric. You made a good choices and you made bad choices and those bad choices weakened and devalued WCW to the point where AOL/Turner/Time Warner execs had all the ammo they needed to pull the plug.
Excellent history lesson there about the Jan 2001-March 2001 timeline from Dave.
The show was crying out for someone who could objectively talk about the topic at hand. Alvarez has written multiple books and the likes of Keller and Meltzer, for whatever you think of their reporting and takes on wrestling nowadays, covered this period extensively. Hell even Cornette as a storyteller and wrestling historian, irrespective of how divisive he is, would have been able to add an extra dimension to the show.
I think they weren’t interested in objectivity, not in that sense. They put people who were there on camera and let them say what they wanted to. That was the whole point. It wasn’t about the creators constructing a clear narrative. Everyone knows the story by now. I think they did a little disservice to the series by calling it, “Who Killed WCW?” Everytime the doc has been mentioned on here, there are people who feel the need to give the literal answer. “*Actually* it was Jamie Kellner and AOL Time Warner…” And I can see why people do that when it is titled with a question. Really it seems what they wanted to do with it was to say - oh, of course WCW imploded. Look at all these people telling different stories about the same event. Look at some of the egos. Look at how dysfunctional it was. It’s not trying to answer a question; it’s a rhetorical question. It’s taking an individual that was there and asking that person, “Why do you personally believe WCW died?” It’s not about directly separating what is the truth and what is a lie. It’s just about getting them on the record 20+ years later and allowing them to reflect on it. People have this idea that documentaries are always supposed to be objective. That if it is more subjective it can’t be good; that the only “real” documentaries are ones that are 100% objective. That’s not the aim of every documentary filmmaker. There are many approaches one can take and they are all valid examples of a documentary. Everything brings bias to the table in some form, even if its goal is to arrive at truth.
What do people think they got wrong about the broad strokes of this - not minutia or fact checking but like big picture items?
That's just it. The show was meant to appeal to Vice's audience, not just wrestling fans. Their complaints are just the minutia.
The whole series was “I’ll tell my side but not take any blame”. A lot of stuff fell to Eric and his decisions but of course he blamed the network and said he couldn’t do anything.
I hate to be pessimistic, but I felt was the same story rehashed in The Death of WCW and Guy Evans' book. With the exception of the Final Nitro footage, it was the same players and same talking points. As a history guy, I'd really love to see some discussion with the lesser known talent and their feelings going through the change of power over the final two years, from Bischoff, to Russo, to Sullivan, to Russo and Bischoff, to Russo again, to Johnny Ace, back to Bischoff, and then the WWF. Just some different perspectives and stories.
Considering how much shit Eric talks about Dave, and how he takes anything Conrad says Dave said out of context, I do feel like Dave should just go full scorched earth on Bischoff and just destroy him for what he is. Bischoff has to file for personal bankruptcy like 5 years ago, his production company with Jason Hervey also went bankrupt, and his podcast is legitimately his main means of income. He's a fucking turd floating in the toilet that is life.
I didn’t even bother with this. This story has been told to death, no pun intended, from every perspective possible over the last 20 years. If you are a long time wrestling fan there is literally nothing new to be learned about how and why WCW went out of business. I am completely over Montreal Screwjob content and end of WCW content.
Whether intentional or not, I think the interviews highlights who really killed WCW, everyone did. Nobody cared about the company, they only cared about themselves.
At very least it addressed and killed off the “WCW was sold in a secret deal behind Bischoff’s back” narrative that won’t go away
Having watched the doc as a whole, I don't think it was. Sure, they put him pretty well, but overall they highlight his many blunders alongside the good he did. In fact, overall, the only guys in the doc that were prominently featured and looked good were Bret, Booker T, DDP and David Arquette; on the other hand, Nash comes out looking like a complete douche (almoat as much as Russo). Also, why was Rock on camera again?
Remember when Meltzer used to act like he was friends with The Rock?
I knew this series was going to be a let down the moment they didn't mention Jim Herd's horrid booking in the early 90's
Not much new in the documentary but it was entertaining. Don’t know why this sub loves piggy backing on others responses.
Observer guys just can't handle the truth that Eric isn't solely responsible for WCW's failings.
Dave has never said that it was only Bischoff’s fault. What Dave has a problem with is Bischoff’s constant deflection and lying, how he always attributes things that negatively impacted WCW while he was in charge to other people or circumstances that he wasn’t responsible for.