Eric Bischoff Weighs On His Missed Opportunity With WCW Saturday Night

On the latest episode of 83 Weeks, Eric Bischoff looked back at the October 7, 1996 episode of Nitro as part of the show’s look at 30 years of the nWo. Conrad Thompson pointed out that Harlem Heat had regained the WCW Tag Team Titles from Public Enemy on the October 5 episode of WCW Saturday Night, and asked whether the title change was meant to keep fans interested in the Saturday show.

Bischoff said he should have used Saturday Night as a bridge to Nitro, recalled learning from Jim Ross that a show can over-promote, and explained why he handed the Saturday show to Jimmy Hart. You can check out his comments below:

On the Saturday Night Title Change:

“It wasn’t enough of a discussion, to be really honest. As you’re laying that out, I’m going, ‘Man, did I miss an opportunity there.’ And I recognize it now with 30-some odd years’ experience under my belt. But then, I didn’t look at Saturday Night as the opportunity that I would today. I’m not sure who came up with the idea, how it happened or to be honest with you, why we did it the way we did it. I can come up with a couple of different guesses, and I think the best one is probably that we wanted to put some urgency on it. We wanted it to feel like it just happened. But what I really should have been thinking about — what all of us should have been thinking about — is how to use Saturday Night episodically. What big things can we do on Saturday Night, even if it’s not main event driven?”

On Learning From Jim Ross About Overpromoting:

“Sometimes you don’t want to over-promote. If it’s lukewarm out of the chute, there’s not much you can do. But if you’ve got something that’s hot, you almost don’t want to push it too hard and it’s a fine line. The reason I hold that position to this day is I remember when I worked for Jim Ross. Jim was a workhorse. He planned, he pre-produced his notes. He knew that format in his sleep, and he was always — I’ll say prepared. Better stated, over-prepared, particularly compared to everything I had seen before or anything that I did as an announcer. So I’m thinking, ‘Okay, he’s my boss. I should kind of model what I do after him.’

“I remember looking at his formats, where he would make notes about what he was going to promote in each segment. And again, I’m not thinking about running the company. I don’t even think I’m a television producer; I have no aspirations to do anything other than be a really good announcer who doesn’t get fired. That was my goal at that point in time. So this wasn’t me being critical; it’s me going, ‘Huh, I wonder if we’re promoting too much. I wonder if we should stop telling people what’s coming up next week.’ By the end of a one-hour show, the audience has next week’s format in their head because Jim just hammered it, which was the old way of doing things back when the live event drove the revenue.”

On Cutting Back On Promotion:

“Go back and look at the formats around that time. Even the syndicated shows, which were nothing more than an infomercial. To be really honest, it was a very entertaining, combat sports-like infomercial. We drove people to the local events. If there was a sponsor, we were driving them to the sponsor. We were telling them where to go buy tickets, because there was no Ticketmaster back in the day. You could get them at this bookstore or at this used car lot. You were pitching so much that in my mind back then, I thought it was taking away from the product. So one of the things I did early on when I had control of the format was start eliminating that stuff and being more selective about what I promoted.”

On What WCW Saturday Night Should Have Been:

“All that backdrop being said, what I should have been thinking about is how to use WCW Saturday Night as a step to the Monday night show. It should be a bridge; it shouldn’t be a standalone show. Occasionally something happened that we talked about on Nitro. That’s really the way we used it, or misused it, which is probably more appropriate. What we should have been thinking about is that it’s just another segment. It’s one two-hour segment on TBS that’s going to give us a reason to want to watch Nitro on Monday.”

On When He Realized It:

“Probably 10 years ago. Way too late. If that same opportunity was presented to me now, there would not even be a conversation about it. It would be part of the plan by default. Sometimes you learn from your mistakes. In this case, it wasn’t even a mistake. It was a missed opportunity, which is worse.”

On Handing WCW Saturday Night to Jimmy Hart:

“I gave WCW Saturday Night to Jimmy Hart. It happened pretty quick. I could be wrong on that. I don’t know what the transition period was. The unfortunate perspective I took on Saturday Night was that it was just something I had to get done that week, as opposed to looking at it as a segment for the Monday night show. But I handed it off to Jimmy. The emphasis on syndication was becoming less and less significant. Syndication used to be a fairly big opportunity for WCW and for television in general, but even back in the ’90s, the syndication market started getting smaller and smaller, and cable kept getting bigger and bigger. You spend your time and resources where you have the greatest amount of success or the potential for it, and that was in cable. So I was de-emphasizing syndication. I really wasn’t spending a lot of time thinking about it, because it just wasn’t significant to the bottom line.”

If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit 83 Weeks with a h/t to 411mania.com for the transcription.