10 Ways Wrestling Was Just BETTER In The '90s
4. It Was Destination Television
Of course, viewing habits are vastly different today when compared to the 1990s, and there is clearly such a wider array of channels and services at play, but it's hard to fully appreciate how much wrestling became 'destination television' in the second half of the decade.
When WCW Nitro launched in September 1994, both that show and WWF Raw would bounce around the 2.5 million mark in their ratings. Skip ahead just 18 months, and it was commonplace to see both shows' viewership simultaneously hitting 4.5 million. There were freak weeks - such as Raw pulling in 7.1 million - but the Monday Night Wars got to a point where Nitro and Raw would often share over 10 million viewers between them.
Wrestling will never hit those ratings highs ever again, but that clearly doesn't mean that there can't be improvement in the sheer number of people watching and watching on a live basis. In the '90s, wrestling became must-see TV on a Monday night, with the antics at play becoming immediate watercooler talk or the chatter of college campuses and schoolyards.
Capturing the zeitgeist of the unique time period of the late '90s, WWF and WCW attracted in non-wrestling fans, had a far broader appeal, and suddenly became cool to those who had often poked fun at the industry. Granted, some of the car-crash booking or more questionable content of that time rightly wouldn't fly today, and it's not everyday you wind up with a white-hot Steve Austin, a game-changing nWo, or a freak specimen like Goldberg.
Regardless, Austin, the nWo, Goldberg, and the energetic, crazy twists and turns of wrestling programming pushed the business to a place in the mainstream consciousness that's nowadays unthinkable.