Review: Vice’s ‘Who Killed WCW’ Part One

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and his business partner Dany Garcia have produced a new series Vice — Who Killed WCW.

The four-part series goes in-depth about the rise and fall of one of the most popular wrestling companies in the 1990s — World Championship Wrestling (WCW). Now like most of these Vice TV Series by the time I was born, WWE had already bought WCW. However, I am intrigued to learn all of the new information that will be added to the already long and controversial story behind WCW. So how did the first episode do? Let’s review.

Eric Bischoff says that no matter how many people you ask the question ‘Who Killed WCW?’ to, somehow it will always lead back to him. However, he would do it all again in a heartbeat.

Bischoff was originally a salesman trying to sell a game called Ninja Star Wars. At the time AWA was one of the only wrestling companies with a TV deal. He reached out to Verne Gagne to run a commercial for Ninja Star Wars and they would split the profits 50/50. Gagne would offer Bischoff a sales job where he would go to different independent TV Stations to try to sell AWA to them. From there he learned about the wrestling business and started becoming an on-air reporter for the AWA. However, in his last six to eight months with the company, Gagne could not afford to pay him so his family suffered financially.

In 1991 Larry Zbyszko, former AWA Champion and Gagne’s son-in-law, was in WCW and reached out to Bischoff as they were looking for announcers. During this period of WCW, so many wrestlers had gimmicks that did not fit them — Kevin Nash was Oz (inspired by The Wizard of Oz), Scott Hall was the Diamond Studd (managed by Diamond Dallas Page), and even RoboCop made an appearance in WCW. Although the fanbase was loyal to the brand many of the executives within Turner Broadcasting were not fans of wrestling — except for the boss, Ted Turner. What started as a little television channel in Atlanta (TBS) turned into an empire in a couple of years and the early success of Turner was due to how well wrestling was doing on those channels.

Yet, by the time 1993 rolled around Kevin Nash and Scott Hall were in WWE. Hall became a huge star as Razor Ramon while Nash rose to fame as Diesel. At the time, WCW was losing millions of dollars a year and Turner Broadcasting wanted to get rid of it. Turner gave WCW one last chance to turn into a profitable company, however, they wanted to hire an executive producer to transform it from a wrestling company to a television property. Bischoff, who always viewed WCW as becoming a television property, threw his name in a hat and became the executive producer of WCW. And this when every began to change for WCW.

One of the major changes that Bischoff made right away was where he would shoot the weekly WCW program. He moved the tapings from Center Stage in Atlanta, GA to MGM Studios (now Hollywood Studios) in Disney World. The reason for the move was he would be able to attract an audience of park goers and wrestling fans compared to before when they were unable to attract fans at all.

By the time 1994 rolled around Bischoff was promoted to Vice President of the company. Now that he had an audience he had to bring in stars to help people believe that WCW could become a direct competition to WWE. His solution? Bringing in Hulk Hogan! While Bischoff was shooting WCW in Disney, Hogan was there shooting Thunder in Paradise. Hogan had been out of wrestling due to the backlash of the steroids trial. Bischoff reached out to Ric Flair to help make the connection and set up a meeting between the two sides to hopefully have Hogan land a deal with WCW.

Hogan signed with WCW and in his original deal he had only agreed to four pay-per-views a year as well as having complete creative control over what his character. With the addition of Hogan, the talent as well as the executives in Turner, were becoming more confident in the success of WCW. In an executive meeting, Turner asked Bischoff what it was going to take to be competitive with WWE. Bischoff said because they are not on prime-time television they could never be competitive with WWE. Turner looked around the room and ordered that WCW will be given two hours of programming every Monday night and that is how WCW Monday Night Nitro was born.

Bischoff had to think of outside-the-box ways to still be competitive with WWE. He decided to run Nitro Live every week, whereas Monday Night Raw was taped every other week. He was also struggling to sell tickets to the show since it was the first one, so he decided to filmed the premiere episode Mall of America so people could just come up and watch the show, and it would look cool on TV.  The magic of being live is that you never knew what was going to happen which brought the shock value to WCW. Between Lex Luger showing up on the first episode of Nitro, to Madusa throwing away the WWE Women’s Championship belt in the garbage, Nitro became something that you could not miss. As time went on Hogan was decreasing in popularity. The fans were booing him and the ratings that WCW once anticipated were not hitting the mark. With everyone seeing the writing on the wall it was time to change the Hulk Hogan character, forever. 

Scott Hall and Kevin Nash came over to WCW and this sent shock waves throughout the entire wrestling world. People thought this was an invasion from WWE and did not know that this revolution was only going to get bigger. Bischoff went to Hogan to discuss creative and he asked Bischoff who the surprise third man was going to be aligning with Nash and Hall. Bischoff, who had tried to convince Sting to be the third man but was failing, asked Hogan who it should be. He said it should be him and at Bash at the Beach 1996, history was made and the NWO was born. The NWO took over pop culture as everyone not only had an NWO shirt but was made aware of what WCW was, and that was the point all along.

Before the NWO had debuted in WCW the ratings were even between them and WWE, however, when the NWO came to fruition the ratings went up, and was responsible for WCW becoming the leading wrestling company in the world. Wanting to maintain the suspense, Bischoff and other producers came up with a backstage fight that looked like NWO just wreaked  havoc. There were baseball bats, spray paint, and even Rey Mysterio was bounced off a trailer truck! This was one of the first types of these segments in wrestling as WCW kept on changing the mold of what a wrestling company can look like on a week-to-week basis. This was the start of the 83-week winning streak WCW had against WWE, and Bischoff became so fixated on the ratings he was beginning to forget what mattered in wrestling. Advertisements and booking weekly TV that made sense were starting to slip Bischoff’s mind. 

After hearing that WWE would have their ideas booked a year out Bischoff thought that he could do that too. He and Hall discuss a new version of the Sting character based on the movie The Crow, which would lead to a darker version of the Sting character. Bischoff was becoming one of the more prominent figures of NWO, which led to the Hulk Hogan vs Sting match at Starrcade for the control of WCW. The original idea was the referee was supposed to give a fast count to have Hogan win, and Bret Hart was going to come in and restart the match, but he was going to be the referee instead. Hart did not like this idea and he thought it was lame. Bischoff convinced Hart it was going to be a good idea. The crowd at first reacted well that WCW was back under regular control, but after they realized how bad the finish was they began to complain online. As Bischoff began attaching himself to Hogan and only listening to him, the hate was becoming real. Hogan would walk into TV, read the script and say that the ideas did not work for him and since his contract stated that he had complete creative control Bischoff would have to change the TV  script for that day. 

Who Killed WCW (Part One) ends with Bischoff saying that the ending for Starrcade 1997 is going to haunt him for the rest of his life as there are some fans out there who believe that is what killed WCW. Around this time, WWE was shifting into the Attitude Era and the gaps in the ratings were becoming closer and closer by the week. The WWE programming was becoming better by the week and while Bischoff was just saying yes to Hogan to make him happy the weekly product began to suffer. 

Overall: I thought the first episode of Who Killed WCW was amazing. The episode went into detail with a lot of things that I did not know happened during this time and set up the plot for the remaining three episodes. I think the cameos from Bischoff, Nash, Turner Executives, and Konnan, amongst others, brought the story together and told the narrative of the beginnings and peak of WCW nicely. If you were a fan of WCW make sure to watch this series!

Who Killed WCW Part One is streaming now on  Vice.