The Monday Night Wars also occurred when there wasn’t a lot of competition for pro-wrestling. Most people were still on dial-up internet with time/data caps—no access to video, even Napster wasn’t a thing until late 99. On the much smaller range of TV programming, there wasn’t much media targeting the young adult audience—MTV, South Park, Simpsons, and Sitcoms were about it… and Sitcoms were on their way out. So pro-wrestling kind of transcended it’s usual sports fan audience when they went with more soap-opera type programming.
At the same time, it was a perfect fit for the shock TV era. But pro-wrestling wasn’t just catching onto a fad, they were a big part of popularizing it.
When the reality TV boom hit, WWE was the only relevant company around. Talent show reality TV had been around for about a decade, and was already established on music television by the end of the 1990s, and then Survivor took the world by storm, dating reality shows popped up all over the place, and Pop Idol exploded onto the scene. WWE Tough Enough was late to the party and felt more like a trend-chaser than a trendsetter. That’s why the reality TV era failed to make an impact, while the previous shock TV/Attitude era made a major impact.
A lot of the decline in pro-wrestling isn’t pro-wrestling’s fault. There’s WAY more media competing with it than there was in 1997-2002. The biggest opportunity for a pro-wrestling “war” isn’t on TV, it’s on streaming services. But things have been moving slower than I’d have guessed they would have.
I describe myself as a little dose of toxic masculinity.
