15 Exact Moments WCW Booking Stopped Making Sense

Imagine Tony Schiavone welcomed fans to the latest episode of AEW TV by gleefully announcing on air that Michael Hayes and Ed Koskey had jumped over from WWE. They'd be writing Dynamite and Collision from now on, or at least helping Tony Khan put together the shows creatively. It'd be rather daft if Schiavone tried to use that as a means to get fans tuning in excited, right?

Yeah, well WCW did that on the 18 October 1999 Nitro with a pair of other ex-WWF/WWE writers.

Schiavone and Bobby Heenan were tasked with putting over how clever, witty and transformative both Vince Russo and Ed Ferrara could be to WCW's product. In effect, they were basically saying: 'Look, we know Nitro and Thunder have been a little worse for wear in 1999 than they were in 1998, but now guys responsible for Raw's success are on our team, so things will definitely turn around soon'.

It was a weird way to go about things, and it was actually very big-headed for Russo and Ferrara to write this into the show. Honestly, who cares about what's happening behind the scenes to that degree when they're sitting down to watch wrestling TV? This sort of backstage stuff should be reserved for docs like the WWE Unreal series on Netflix. It'd have no place on Raw or SmackDown, for example.

You wouldn't have seen cast members from Friends pause mid-episode to let you know that somebody else was writing jokes for the show now. That level of self back-patting is hard to stomach. WCW was a mess by this point, it really was.