Before 1995: Monday becomes RAW

Monday Night RAW was launched on USA Network in January 1993. The previous WWF program on USA, Prime Time Wrestling (which was edited from syndicated programming), was losing its audience. The WWF decided that it should use its cable time as a showcase for original matches and storylines that would serve as the major build-up to the monthly pay-per-view. Originally, RAW, within a two-or-three week period, was broadcast live, but budget constraints later limited live broadcasts so that they could only take place once a month. That, and the defection of such main event talent as Hulk Hogan and Randy Savage to WCW, gave Eric Bischoff an opportunity on which he was quick to exploit.

1995-1997: Nitro declares War

The war started in 1995, when Ted Turner granted WCW boss Eric Bischoff an hour-long show to compete against RAW. On September 4 of that year, Nitro premiered as a one-hour show on TNT. In it, Lex Luger, who had been working on a handshake deal with WWF boss Vince McMahon, made a surprise appearance and joined WCW. In the first six months of the war, RAW and Nitro had eleven wins each, with two ties.

The war really began on May 27, 1996 when Scott Hall (who had previously been Razor Ramon in the WWF) interrupted a match and said he was taking over the show. When confronted by Sting by the end of the show, Hall promised a big surprise. The following week, Kevin Nash (who had been Diesel in the WWF) also showed up. They claimed they had a third man with them, but the man didn't show up for several weeks.

Finally at Bash at the Beach on July 7, the third man was revealed to be Hulk Hogan, who turned heel and declared in his post-match speech that he, Hall and Nash were "the new world order of professional wrestling." Fueled by this stunning turn of events, Nitro defeated RAW for 84 straight head to head weeks, beginning with the June 3 show.

1997-1998: McMahon strikes back

When Bret Hart joined WCW after the Montreal Screwjob at the 1997 Survivor Series, it appeared WCW was going to push the WWF right off the map. WCW had seemingly the big stars people wanted to see: Hogan, Nash, Hall, Hart, Ric Flair, Sting, Randy Savage, Chris Benoit, Eddie Guerrero, Rey Mysterio, Jr., Lex Luger, Diamond Dallas Page, Raven, Syxx, etc. But in 1998, the war turned in McMahon's favor. After the Montreal incident, McMahon was recast as the evil owner, Mr. McMahon, who feuded with Stone Cold Steve Austin, who was ironically fired by Bischoff in 1995 as not being marketable enough. Meanwhile, Mick Foley, another WCW castoff, was being cheered for playing the heel Mankind, and The Rock (who had flopped as the babyface Rocky Maivia) was making a name for himself as a catchphrase spewing member of the Nation of Domination. WWE programming featured edgy characters and reflected society which was at the height of the "Attitude Era." The RAW storylines were now adult-oriented and RAW's ratings began to rise. Finally, on April 13, 1998, RAW beat Nitro, thanks to a teased Austin/McMahon match that never took place.

WCW decided to get back into the lead with Bill Goldberg, known in the ring only by his last name, as the new big star. On July 6, 1998 at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, Nitro defeated RAW when Goldberg pinned Hogan cleanly to win the WCW World Heavyweight Title, even though a Goldberg/Hogan match could have made millions as a PPV main event. The match drew a 6.91 rating for the quarter-hour, the highest in the war up to that time. RAW took back the lead soon thereafter, but WCW would win for the last time on October 26 when the World Title match between DDP and Goldberg from the previous night's Halloween Havoc PPV was aired due to some PPV viewers losing the feed at 11 p.m.

1999-2000: The Tide Turns

By the start of 1999, both shows were consistently getting 5.0 or higher Nielsen ratings, and over ten million people tuned in to RAW and Nitro every week. Wrestling was the place to be, as wrestlers made the mainstream media, appearing on magazine covers like Entertainment Weekly and TV Guide. But on the first Monday of that year, the tide began to turn in McMahon's favor for good.

That Monday night, January 4, saw Nitro originate once again from the Georgia Dome. In the second of three hours (the show had expanded to two hours in 1996 and three in 1998), Bischoff revived a previous tactic he had used earlier in the war, revealing the outcome of matches on the taped RAW airing on USA. He ordered announcer Tony Schiavone to announce that Mick Foley (as Mankind) was going to defeat The Rock for the WWF Championship. Schiavone then said sarcastically that it would "put butts in the seats." When Schiavone said those words, over 600,000 viewers changed their channels to watch Foley win the title. Nitro's main event was the infamous "Fingerpoke of Doom" where Hogan tapped his finger on Nash (who had become the booker), causing Nash to lie down for Hogan to win the belt. It led to another heel turn for Hogan, and the reformation of the entire nWo. The match might have started Nitro's demise; the show would only get a 5.0 rating twice afterwards; its 5.8 rating on February 8 (on a night when RAW was pre-empted) was the last time it would get such a number.

By then, WCW's main eventers (Hogan, Sting, Flair, Savage, Luger, Hall and Nash) were in their 40s or pushing 40. Bret Hart had been misused so badly that he never really was allowed the chance to become a major player in WCW, despite an estimated $3 million a year contract. The likes of Jericho, Benoit, Guerrero, etc. were never given the chance to be elevated to main event status. In the summer of 1999, Jericho left WCW and joined the WWF, where a "Countdown to the Millennium" clock heralded his arrival. When he made his RAW debut, he got into a confrontation with The Rock, and RAW beat Nitro that night by four ratings points. This was now a pattern. RAW was dominating Nitro so much that WCW tried quick fixes to stem the tide, including hiring rapper Master P (who bombed) and bringing in Megadeth and KISS for concerts (both of which flopped in the ratings). Finally, in September 1999, Bischoff was removed from power. Meanwhile, RAW's numbers continued to rise; a 25-minute long This is Your Life themed skit between The Rock and Foley drew an 8.4 quarter-hour rating on September 27. That was the highest quarter-hour recorded by either show during the war.

On October 5, 1999, Vince Russo and Ed Ferrera, both of whom had written for the WWF, were lured away by WCW. Russo and Ferrera failed to capture the magic of their WWF days when they turned Nitro into more of a RAW clone, and they became known as "The Powers That Be." Ferrera even became a parody of Jim Ross called Oklahoma. Nitro's ratings failed to increase, and in January 2000, they were gone. Furthermore, the subsequent promotion of Kevin Sullivan to head booker caused an uproar among WCW's wrestlers. In spite of winning the WCW title at Souled Out, Chris Benoit quit in protest, along with Eddie Guererro, Perry Saturn and Dean Malenko, All four of them entered the WWF as The Radicalz, premiering on RAW's January 31 episode- the very next night after Benoit's title win.

The departure of the four led WCW down the road to ruin. WCW became even more desperate, even going as far as putting the belt on David Arquette, who was in the promotion's 2000 movie Ready to Rumble. Nitro was cut to two hours in January 2000 in an effort to bolster the aggregate ratings score, but the elimination of the third hour didn't mean higher ratings for Nitro, which now averaged around a 2.5 (while RAW got double or sometimes triple that amount).

In April 2000, Bischoff and Russo returned with equal power to work as a team and restructure WCW. The main story was that old way of life in WCW was over. Hogan, Flair, Luger, Sid, Sting, and DDP, etc. were The Millionaires Club, led by Bischoff, and were said to be afraid of losing their spots and to be keeping the younger talent down. Billy Kidman, Rey Mysterio, Jr., Booker T, Buff Bagwell, Shane Douglas, etc. were The New Blood, led by Russo, and would finally get an even playing field to breakout as big stars in wrestling. The new storyline interested some people, but it failed to turn the ratings tide with it.

By now, Ted Turner was no longer running the company, having been swallowed up by Time Warner in 1996 and then AOL in the 2000 merger of the two companies. In 2000, WCW was on its way to losing $62 million, due to the guaranteed contracts of their older performers, plummeting advertising revenues, dropping house show attendances, ridiculous booking decisions (like Russo booking himself to win the World Title in September) and abysmal pay-per-view buyrates. Also, bad luck hit the company: Goldberg had a botched heel turn at The Great American Bash, Hart retired from wrestling from a concussion, and Hogan left the company after the 2000 Bash at the Beach. In the fall, rumors began to spread that WCW was up for sale.

In September 2000, Russo left the company due to a concussion, and shows were written by Ed Ferrara, Bill Banks, Jeremy Borash, Disco Inferno, and various other wrestlers, and staff. Eric Bischoff would leave in the summer of 2000.

2001: The End of the War

In early January 2001, Bischoff led a new group called Fusient Media Ventures and announced they had bought WCW. The deal was contingent on the Turner networks keeping Nitro on Monday and WCW Thunder on TBS on Wednesday. When Jamie Kellner took over as programmer of the Turner Networks, the first thing he did was cancel WCW programming, and unlike the past, Ted Turner could not stop it. With no networks to air the shows, Fusient decided to back out when a new lowered price agreement could not be reached. Now Vince McMahon was looking to buy WCW. As a stipulation in the lawsuit that the WWF filed against WCW for the Outsiders invading storyline that caused confusion in the marketplace, the WWF had first dibs on WCW and basically set their price for around $2.5 million to acquire certain assets including the trademarks, logos, and video library. Wrestlers contracts were actually not part of the sale, and AOL Time Warner continued to pay many of the wrestlers for years after the sale took place on March 23, 2001.

McMahon did allow a final Nitro show to air from Panama City Beach which had been scheduled for the following Monday on March 26. It featured him and the WWF stars from Cleveland airing in segments during the show. The final WCW World Heavyweight Championship match for the show and the company saw Booker T unify the WCW World Heavyweight Championship and WCW United States Heavyweight Championship by defeating Scott Steiner. The main event saw Sting defeat Ric Flair with the Scorpion Deathlock as a culmination of their trademark feud, then both men embraced one another at the match's conclusion.

The end was a RAW/Nitro simulcast in which Shane McMahon said that he (and not Vince) had bought WCW. That set up the ill-fated Invasion storyline. The last Nitro drew a 3.0 rating. The final ratings tally in 253 head-to-head showdowns was: 144 wins for RAW (including 114 straight wins from October 1998 until the war ended), 106 for Nitro, and three ties (see the Monday Night Wars: Ratings chart for the complete week-by-week Nielsen ratings rundown).

Aftermath

In 2004, the since-renamed WWE produced a DVD called The Monday Night War, which was alleged by some critics to be a one-sided telling of the war. The DVD featured highlights of Nitro (since WWE now owned the WCW footage) and RAW. Interestingly, fans tended to respond favorably to this DVD as they believed it was about as close to a 'true' documentary of the war as was ever going to be seen.

Some fans claimed that the DVD was mostly honest and tried to tell an accurate view of the war. Objectively, the majority of the fans saw the documentation as a series of lies or perhaps the bitter viewpoints of WWE wrestlers and some former WCW talent. Eric Bischoff, one of the most prominent people in the documentary, was given a fair amount of leeway to pretty much lambast the company in interviews when recalling the events that took place during the war.

The DVD was ultimately a decent representation of the factual occurrences, but was presented entirely with a one-sided spin that presented any accomplishment from WCW as inferior, while magnifying all of the problems in the company. It also left out a large portion of the history of the show, breaking off around 1997 before jumping straight to the post-Monday Night Wars Era of WWE.

RAW's ratings after the end of the war have dropped to around a 3.8 to 4.4 today, even though it is back on the USA Network. With The Rock no longer wrestling due to his movie career, Austin and Foley reduced to semi-regulars, and Chris Jericho taking an indefinite hiatus (and even though RAW has had such newer, younger stars as Batista and John Cena become main eventers), wrestling is no longer the hot mainstream property that it was during the war.

Tactics

Both the WWF and WCW tried tactics against the competition during the war. As mentioned before, early on Bischoff revealed the ending of taped RAW matches in an effort to keep the audience from changing the channel to RAW.

McMahon (who had not mentioned any other promotions in the past) had to mention WCW. In 1996, McMahon poked fun at Turner with "Billionaire Ted" skits which also made fun of Hogan ("Huckster"), Savage ("Nacho Man") and Gene Okerlund ("Scheme Gene"). Vince Russo appeared in these skits. The skits in actuality backfired in more than one way. Ted Turner and Bischoff thought they were funny, though they did eventually file suit against the WWF to force them to stop.

In 1998, on a Monday when both shows were in the Hampton Roads region of Virginia, D-Generation X went to where Nitro was, berating WCW fans, and even went as far as going to the CNN Center.

Both promotions raided each other's talent during the war. Appearing on both shows were Scott Hall, Kevin Nash, Bret Hart, Rick Rude (who appeared on both shows the same night), Chris Jericho, Terry Funk, Chris Benoit, Eddie Guerrero, Dean Malenko, Jeff Jarrett, Sean Waltman (as the 1-2-3 Kid, Syxx, and X-Pac), Brian Pillman, Davey Boy Smith, Jim Niedhart, Perry Saturn, and Chris Candido. Both companies also reached into ECW's talent pool. Paul Heyman in The Rise and Fall of ECW states that ECW itself was the first actual victim if not outright casualty of the Monday Night Wars.