I'm not going to do one of those things where I overcook the praise and try and retcon it as being great TV either, but WCW really does get steadily better from October 2000 through to its close.
The toughest hurdle with these shows is usually the atmosphere. Or lack thereof. When I think of low energy, my mind pictures blue rope Nitro, because they started taping Thunder straight after and either didn't care or budget enough to change the ropes.
Then there is the crowds. Most of them are just standing about swaying their arms like GTA III pedestrians. There's a few absolute die-hards who still bring signs about how Raw sucks. There's also a few people clearly three sheets to the wind, wanted a night out, and are the precise kind of fans who are so casual that they know they don't mind being seen at wrestling, but evidently don't know that this is the shit one.
Another difficult thing with the WWE uploads is Ernest Miller and Misfits in Action's themes being overdubbed. Because you hear both - along with the Natural Born Thrillers theme - about four hundred times each episode and the dubs are absolutely brutal.
If you can get over that - though - WCW does slowly, slowly build a sort of really sad final bit of steam that amounts to it at least developing a bit of logical consistency and swerving to avoid angles that would make you embarrassed if somebody else walked into the room. Late WCW Steiner rules and building a promotion around him is absolutely not a problem at all. Booker as the people's champ is still better than anything he did in WWE, to me. The cruiserweights start getting featured much better in 2001. Whilst Natural Born Thrillers sort of prophecy the generic hoss wave in the next few years in WWE, they are at the end of the day young studs etc so spotlighting them so prominently is hard to dislike.
Overall, it just feels like they at least start feeling a bit like sports presentation WCW again. It's infinitely better than the Russo stuff, which seemed to go through a false renaissance as the dumb stoner action movie version of wrestling when it's actually just horrifically shit.
Edit: Oh yeah, and when Mark Madden gets sacked in December? Nitro improves so much as background viewing. He's the worst.
