>>13462582Pretty much, it wasn't just TV but you had the nu metal/industrial/whatever you'd call shit like Rob Zombie and Marilyn Manson music, the slasher revival and all that. I think Columbine did a lot of damage to the desire of people to want trashy, edgy, lowbrow entertainment and then 9/11 and the War on Terror finished the job. Reality TV started getting big at the time and become the final form of trash entertainment but its popularity is largely among a specific demographic (women, and specifically white women) and is nowhere near as widespread as pro wrestling's popularity was. Men had MMA but I don't know if UFC at its peak matched WWF/WCW at its peak and no way it ever came close to boxing during the '60s-'80s.
Austin staying face or Rock being around as a face to go against heel Austin or the Invasion not being bungled wasn't going to stop it. At most it might have slowed the slide a bit but that would only be a temporary thing.
Also why I hate the idea that Dave and fans tried to push in the 2000s/2010s of wrestling's popularity being a cycle because it's not. Wrestling's big boom periods came about because it was able to hit the cultural zeitgeist: emergence of organized professional athletic competition in the early 1900s, emergence of television in the 1950s, the whole move to spectacle in the 1980s and jumping in on the edgy, anti-authority GenX bent of the late '90s.
