The Monday Night Wars
This was posted to Cohost about a year ago.
I've been getting into professional wrestling recently after many years away from it. I've been going to a lot of local shows and I'm now watching a lot of old Attitude Era stuff on the WWE Network.
Getting into wrestling is a lot like (in fact, exactly the same as) getting into a soap opera. The storylines have been going on for so long that finding a good in point is tough. You're always going to be missing something. Often it's best to just start from the most recent episode and trust that you'll eventually catch up, but it's very much the case with wrestling that the modern stuff just isn't as good as the late 90s and early-to-mid 00s.
The Attitude Era broadly overlaps with the Monday Night Wars, a period from September 1995 to March 2001 when WWF Raw and WCW Nitro broadcast opposite each other on Monday nights in an ongoing ratings war. It's pretty much a golden age of wrestling, because the two promotions were desperately trying to be bigger and better than each other, and there's a ton of fun politics happening behind the scenes as they each try to poach each others' talent etc.
I've never really seen any WCW - which, by all accounts, was much better than the WWF until around '97 or '98 - and I'm in need of an entrance point where I can start watching stuff sequentially rather than doing what I'm currently doing, which is just watching one-off classic matches. That's fun, but the matches are made much more entertaining when you also buy into the soap opera side of things. So I'm going to watch all of WCW Nitro and Raw during the Monday Night Wars period (or at least, as much of it as I can before I get sick of it). I imagine I'll watch the pay per views and things as well, but we'll see.
And I'm going to blog my way through it, because my memory is terrible and I want to actually have something I can refer back to if I need to.