The original Monday Night Wars were started by WCW in 1995, when Eric Bischoff was asked by Ted Turner what it would take to fight the WWF on their own terms.
Eric off-handedly responded “Two hours live on TNT every Monday” and suddenly “WCW Monday Nitro” was born. It was an immediate success out of the gate and revolutionized pro wrestling as we know it.
This is not that story.
Fast forward to 2010, nine years after WCW was dead and buried (and then buried several more times by WWE), with some of the remnants of the old company struggling to keep TNA afloat through declining ratings on the impossibly patient Spike TV. Eric Bischoff was once again hired to be the person steering the ship, with Hulk Hogan as his top star, and once again he went to the network and asked for two hours live on Mondays to fight WWE on their own terms.
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Unfortunately, this time it went much worse for him.
TNA Impact debuted in their new live form on Jan. 4, 2010, with the theory being that they could recapture some of the lost WCW fans and/or steal a significant portion of WWE’s audience. To that end, their first live Impact in the new timeslot featured a crazy amount of debuting wrestlers, including Hogan, Ric Flair, Jeff Hardy, Scott Hall, Kevin Nash, X-Pac, Val Venis and the Nasty Boys. Ratings were initially very strong compared to their usual Thursday timeslot — jumping from a 1.1 average to a 1.5 and more importantly seeming to cost WWE ratings points at the same time — but the show itself was a disaster. It was set up like a million other Eric Bischoff/Vince Russo “reboot” episodes of “WCW Nitro” in 2000 throwing out a bunch of angles and debuts that ended up going nowhere.
The first match on the show was an overdone cage match in which no one could understand the rules, and ended in a no-contest while fans chanted obscenities. The featured segment of the night was a bizarre interview with Hogan and Bischoff, where they told Hall and Nash that everyone was supposed to be “here for business," which led to a reunion of the New World Order that lasted a couple of weeks and then was never mentioned again.
Bischoff even declared that he was “tearing up the script” and then tore up a real script of the show, which security had to retrieve from the fans in the front row who grabbed it.
After that pilot episode of sorts was a big ratings success by TNA standards, TNA officially announced that Impact would be moving to Mondays in March, full time. Ratings were OK for a few weeks with the new format — although Hogan had the famous six-sided ring changed back to four sides at the Genesis 2010 PPV without telling talent beforehand — but once WWE went into WrestleMania mode, things went off a cliff.
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Whereas Impact had been averaging a 1.1 rating on Thursdays, they were unable to ever break 1.0 again on Mondays. With ratings falling, their new acquisitions were quickly drummed out again.
Case in point: Val Venis, who only lasted a couple of matches and beat TNA mainstay Christopher Daniels in a pointless feud, before leaving. The Nasty Boys barely even made it on TV before thankfully returning to the autograph circuits. Finally, after months of failure after failure and “Monday Night RAW” mercilessly beating them week after humiliating week (including ratings dropping to 0.62 at one point, or roughly the same as a test pattern), TNA crawled back to Thursday nights in June. Or more accurately, Thurdsay nights.
Amazingly, seven years later this company is still alive and putting out TV, like wrestling’s version of a cockroach, but not for lack of trying to self-destruct. The latest catastrophe has seen new owners Anthem Entertainment bleeding money since buying them, and cutting jobs from their own Fight Network to continue funding the Impact dumpster fire, but history has shown that TNA will probably somehow continue to survive against all odds.
Or sanity.
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