Thursday Nitro
By Scott Keith on 9 June 2015
Hi Scott,
Just thought, I know that at a certain point Nitro became unwatchable period. But, hypothetically, if, say around summer '99, WCW just decided to quit the Wresting Wars and move to, say, Thursday, would that have made a difference as far as their longevity was concerned.
I mean, WCW had a built in audience that was giving them a 4.0 no matter what Raw was doing. If they could move that audience to another night and not be tainted by the loser stink of admitting defeat in the Wars, I feel like maybe they could rebuild their portion of the audience who were amenable to watching Nitro but were, for whatever reason, watching Raw.
Yeah, but the problem with all these fantasy scenarios is that WCW had a kill switch on it of March 2001 no matter what. Even if WCW was still drawing decent ratings (which they were) and carrying a reasonable audience with them, Jamie Kellner wanted wrestling off Time-Warner's networks. Period. The only hope of survival would have been another company buying WCW and moving it to a competing network, like USA. They couldn't move to a Turner network and they couldn't move to Viacom due to the WWF deal, so pretty much it was USA or FOX or dead. And without TV, WCW was worthless except as the library that Vince bought.