Eric Bischoff apparently had plans to launch a WCW reality show years before WWE introduced Tough Enough, and the concept would have put 21 young wrestlers under one roof. The idea was to film their lives, capture the drama and follow their journey toward earning a spot on WCW Nitro, but the show never got off the ground.
During an appearance on Insight with Chris Van Vliet, former WCW star Shannon Moore revealed that he and several other cruiserweights were originally hired in the late 1990s for what he understood to be Bischoff’s reality television project. Moore admitted he never got full confirmation of the plans, but what he heard sounded a lot like the show WWE would eventually produce.
“Still haven’t confirmed exactly what it uh, was that Eric Bischoff was trying to do, but from what it sounds like, he was trying to do Tough Enough uh, before Tough Enough was ever a thing uh, in uh, WCW.”
The proposed show would have taken inspiration from MTV’s The Real World, which was a major success at the time. Instead of simply following people living together, WCW would have filled the house with aspiring wrestlers competing for an opportunity to appear on Nitro. Moore explained how the concept was supposed to work.
“I think like the concept was that Eric was going to hire at that point uh, 21 cruiserweights. And he was going to put them in a house and the journey for them to make it to the big show, which would be Nitro uh, was going to be filmed and edited and I’m pretty sure it was going to be like the drama that comes with these 21 cruiserweights living together in a house, but that was the original idea.”
Unfortunately, the project never became a television series. Moore recalled that WCW released most of the young wrestlers shortly after signing them, leaving only a handful on the roster.
“Shortly after we were hired, a few months after, out of the 21 cruiserweights, like there was only I think five or six that they didn’t fire. And uh, me and Shane, Jimmy Wang Yang, Jamie Noble, um, you know, there were several of us that they kept around.”
Those who survived the cuts were eventually sent to the WCW Power Plant for training. Moore and Shane Helms were among the wrestlers who remained with the company, but the reality show concept was seemingly abandoned.
WWE eventually launched Tough Enough on MTV in 2001, using a reality television format to follow aspiring wrestlers competing for WWE contracts. Had WCW followed through with its proposed series, the company could have beaten WWE to that concept.
Bischoff has explored different approaches to wrestling television throughout his career. As Ringside News previously covered, Bischoff later expressed interest in Lucha Underground’s unconventional wrestling format, another project that combined wrestling with a different style of television production.
WCW never got the chance to bring its reality show idea to television, and Moore’s account leaves plenty of questions about how far the project actually progressed. Still, the possibility that Bischoff was considering a Tough Enough-style series before WWE launched its own is another interesting piece of WCW history.
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