WCW Monday Nitro was a professional wrestling television program for World Championship Wrestling (WCW). The show ran from September 4, 1995 to March 26, 2001 and had 288 episodes.
History
When Nitro debuted it started a ratings battle which became known as the Monday Night Wars between WCW and WWF which lasted almost six years. WCW started the nWo storyline which helped them gain more viewers than the WWF. They would continue to defeat the WWF in viewers for 84 consecutive weeks which forced WWF owner Vince McMahon to change the style of wrestling his promotion was doing and introduce The Attitude Era. As the nWo storyline became stale, fans turned from WCW to watch the WWF.
On the January 4, 1999 episode of Nitro, commentator Tony Schiavone gave away the results to Raw which included underdog Mick Foley defeating The Rock saying: "Fans, if you're even thinking about changing the channel to our competition, do not. We understand that Mick Foley, who wrestled here at one time as Cactus Jack, is gonna win their World title. Ha! That's gonna put some butts in the seats, heh."
Bischoff thought that in doing this, viewers would be put off by this and would not watch Raw. His plan backfired however and a lot of Nitro viewers changed the channel to watch Raw because they were excited to see the underdog Foley win the championship. The fans switched back to Nitro after Foley won but from that week on, Nitro was beat by Raw in the ratings by a large amount and WCW was never able to regain their former success.