I Watched An Entire Year of WCW 2000 and All I Got Was This Stupid List

I Watched An Entire Year of WCW 2000 And All I Got Was This Stupid List

So for those following my journey through the tumultuous period that was 2000 WCW, you know that I took a deep breath and started reviewing right from the first episode of the year and finally finished up the night after Starrcade 2000. Was it worth the year of my life? I don’t think so. But I did learn some fascinating things about the decline of the company, which actually challenged some of my preconceptions.

1. “Vince Russo wasn’t WCW’s only problem — but nearly every time he left, the show immediately became easier to watch.”

I know, saying that Russo leaving helped matters isn’t exactly a hot take, but man the evidence piled up quickly over the course of the rants. It’s not even that Russo’s shows were notably more “bad” than other episodes, but rather, when he left at various points and let other people run the show, things got so noticeably better and easier to watch. Case in point, June 19, which was one of the best shows of the year thanks to just having sane finishes and normal wrestling after six months of Crash TV bullshit over and over.

https://www.blogofdoom.com/rant/the-smark-rant-for-wcw-monday-nitro-06-19-00/

And then July 18, where Johnny Ace gets a chance to impose some order and sanity on the finishes and produces one of the best Nitros of the year again thanks to the US title tournament.

https://www.blogofdoom.com/rant/the-smark-rant-for-wcw-monday-nitro-07-18-00/

The lesson is not necessarily a black and white “Russo is bad”, but more like “Russo can work when you have someone to edit the shit out of him”, even in a company like WCW.

2. “The worst thing WCW did wasn’t bad wrestling. It was making the viewer feel stupid for caring.”

I think this is the main point of my entire 2000 run on the show. It was impossible to get involved as a viewer because they turned around and undermined every bit of momentum they built up. World champions get crowned and then stripped, rules of engagement change halfway through angles, people have feuds over backstage squabbles that home viewers couldn’t possibly understand because the people writing the show barely understood them either.

Case in point, the famous April reboot episode, where you needed a literal decoder ring to understand what Bischoff and Russo were complaining about.

https://www.blogofdoom.com/rant/the-smark-rant-for-wcw-monday-nitro-04-10-00/

How was a regular viewer supposed to be able to watch the show and follow the story when you were LITERALLY PUNISHED for trying to keep up week to week? The April show just came out and said “Everything you’ve watched for the past four months doesn’t matter and we’re starting over.” That’s not just bad, that’s insulting to the viewer.

3. “WCW kept trying to create new stars by telling you that the old stars were better than them.”

Man this one drove me crazy even at the time. The New Blood is supposed to be this group of guys fighting against the “good old boys” holding them down, but the supposed young guys are comprised of people who debuted back in the 80s and much of the storyline progression is Kevin Nash beating the hell of the young talent he’s supposed to be helping to elevate. Poor Billy Kidman got run over by Hulk Hogan on TV, both figuratively and literally. Mike Awesome was brought in as ECW World champion and then immediately beaten repeatedly until he was turned into That 70s Guy.

https://www.blogofdoom.com/rant/the-smark-rant-for-wcw-monday-nitro-04-17-00/

Really, the supposed youth movement turned out to be a bunch of 40 year old guys explaining why 50 year old guys had held them down.

4. “Every WCW reboot lasted approximately one episode.”

Oh man Chris Benoit is gonna be the World champion and start a new era of banger matches on top and young guys ruling the promotion! Psyche, never mind. Oh man Russo and Bischoff are gonna reboot the company and change all the rules and crown new champions and it’s gonna be different! Psyche, never mind. Over and over, the company was Lucy pulling away the football from Charlie Brown, where WCW is Lucy and the fans are Charlie Brown and the football is, I dunno, good TV? Metaphors are hard. Hell, when the run of the show wrapped up on 12/18/00, they had been promising the return of Glacier for like two months and hadn’t even delivered THAT yet.

Really, the tagline for the company should have been “OK, THIS TIME WE MEAN IT!” because it would have been about as meaningful as anything else they came up with.

5. “The roster was nowhere near as bad as the television.”

I mean really, look at what they were working with, even as the company fell apart. You had Goldberg, Hulk Hogan, Lex Luger, Ric Flair, Sid Vicious, Scott Steiner, Booker T, and all kinds of other star power still on top and getting featured weekly. And you had the whole cruiserweight division, especially at the end with the Jung Dragons and Three Count battling weekly for apathetic crowds but still having banger matches years ahead of their time. And Lance Storm managed to get over despite all the stupidity around him and people trying to hold him back through sheer force of willpower. Although it didn’t last forever. Point being, there were so many times that the company could have succeeded just by getting out of their own goddamn way, which made it all the more frustrating to see them squander the endless amounts of talent they had left over and over. You can absolutely argue that WCW did not die because there wasn’t anyone worth watching. Even Kronik was pretty good at what they were supposed to be. KRONIK. I’m actually defending Kronik here!

6. “The World title became a prop in a television writer’s room instead of the reason people fought.”

Not exactly another hot take. But even in January you had all the nonsense with Sid and Jeff Jarrett and Kevin Nash and the title gets reversed and lost and regained and lost again and the year is already off a bad start. And of course, David Arquette was still a thing that happened, not to mention Hulk Hogan at Bash at the Beach and their plan to split the World title in half and build to some kind unification match or whatever they were gonna do. By the time poor Booker got the belt, you could argue it was too late for the title anyway, but at least he seemed like he cared about winning it. But then by September you have Russo literally booking himself as the primary force behind the title and main challenger and it was too late to save it. This was the belt that had supposedly been around since 1905 and fought over by the greatest names in the sport, and WCW managed to burn through all that emotional goodwill in a period of months, reducing it to a prop in the failed Wargames reboot.

https://www.blogofdoom.com/rant/the-smark-rant-for-wcw-monday-nitro-09-25-00/

If every title change is shocking, then no title changes are shocking. I think that’s the lesson here.

7. “Worked shoots age worse than almost anything else in wrestling.”

Oh MY GOD by the end of the year I could not take another episode of Mark Madden getting himself over by insulting someone on air based on a childish beef from backstage while I sighed and checked the Observer to see what the hell I was supposed to be remembering about the segment because it’s 26 years later and NO ONE FUCKING CARES ANYMORE. Yeah, in 2000 it was cool and hip and edgy to reference the internet and the dirt sheets, but when you need an Observer subscription to just understand the basic plots of the storyline beats, you have fallen off a cliff you’re not coming back from. Worst among this was Kevin Nash constantly calling out Scott Hall by the end of the year. Hall was fired and not coming back, but Nash turned him into a martyr for some unknown cause to get himself over, and fans who had no inside knowledge of the reasons why he was gone just assumed “Scott Hall was fired because he was too much of a bad boy” or whatever vague reasoning they came up with in their own minds. But hey, he got a World title out of it, so I guess that shows why he was the smartest man in wrestling at that point.

8. “The decline becomes physically visible.”

I think this one was best summed up by the episode late in the year where I accidentally started watching the 1999 episode of the same week by mistake, and was struck by how much better the show looked and felt even a year before. The buildings got smaller and darker and cheaper as 2000 went on, and even if you didn’t know what was happening with the budget cuts and talent losses, you could see the story unfolding on TV week after week.

https://www.blogofdoom.com/rant/the-smark-rant-for-wcw-monday-nitro-11-20-00/

Did I need an Observer recap to tell me that there was no one in the building and the crowd was dead? Nope. You could watch the decay of WCW live every week and see it fall further each time, and there was no disguising that, especially with Rock and Austin on WWF TV weekly, living their best lives and drawing thousands of fans. I didn’t need to see the balance sheet to know which way the profit margins were going for WCW by the end.

9. “WCW eventually got less insane, but that somehow created a new problem”

Sure, by late 2000 Russo was dead and buried as booker and not coming back, and the company was on borrowed time and sure to be sold to the WWF, but instead of producing inspiring new content, it just led to this incredibly boring period of Russo wannabe bookers like Terry Taylor and Ed Ferrera trying to duplicate whatever secret sauce that Russo had, and failing miserably. It was worse than bad, it was BORING, and it even reflected in the site itself, as readership and engagement of my Nitro reviews went off a cliff.

https://www.blogofdoom.com/rant/the-smark-rant-for-wcw-monday-nitro-11-06-00/

Was catastrophic WCW actually a more compelling product than dull as dishwater Booker T champion WCW? I leave it up to you to discuss.

10. “By the time WCW started behaving like a proper company again, no one trusted them anymore.”

By the end of 2000, Flair is back in authority on TV, Scott Steiner is champion, Booker T is established as a main guy, young talent are getting TV time, and the show is less about Russo fever dreams and more about Mike Sanders. But ratings collapse, PPV buyrates had collapsed, production quality is in the toilet, and TBS is openly trying to unload the company on anyone who will put together a proposal. Case in point, the sad push of Goldberg at the end of the year, where he had to have a perfect record in order to keep his job. They tried to duplicate the magic of the streak, before eventually just giving up and having him lose a stupid tag match to Lex Luger and ending his career with a whimper because he was too expensive. Did it even draw a buyrate? Nope.

https://www.blogofdoom.com/rant/the-smark-rant-for-wcw-starrcade-2000-12-17-00/

The company spent so long telling viewers that nothing mattered, that eventually people started believing them. You as a viewer were punished for paying attention, and the result is that by the end, no one was watching anymore.

So what made you finally give up on WCW? Or did you stick around to the bitter end like me? Thanks for coming on this journey with me, either way.