Although I don't have any interest in wrestling the likes of AEW and WWE anymore there was a time in my youth that I was somewhat obsessed with it to the point where I would buy magazines and really try to go to any house shows that I could. I ended up only seeing 3 events live and they were smaller ones that were cheap to go to and not televised. They were still immensely fun though and it was amazing to see the guys that I had only seen on TV and in magazines up close and personal. It was tons of fun and while I don't know if I would enjoy it as much today as I did when I was a teen, I am really happy that I went to them.
Dark Side of the Ring gave me a newfound respect for the men and women that are involved in this industry because while it was quite obvious that these people work really hard for their physique, it is really alarming to me how much training, abuse, and addiction that comes along with the industry. Dark Side is probably one of those things that the owners of today's wrestling promotions would prefer you don't watch, and that is exactly why I decided to watch it.
Keep in mind that I have only seen 1 season of this, so I am not attempting to make a broad judgement on the entire series. They must be doing reasonably well because they are still making them today although their future might be in jeopardy since it is produced by Vice media, which has been having serious financial issues lately.
It should be relatively obvious what this series is about but in case you are st st st stupid I'll tell you anyway. This series attempts to expose certain elements of the industry that are not revealed to the public such as backstage drama, the politics that takes place back there and how some wrestlers are favored over others and how some are intentionally screwed over and turned into "jobbers" which is someone that is always scheduled to lose in order to promote someone else. While even as a kid I noticed the rise and fall of some of my favorite wrestlers I was never aware of the fact that a lot of the time these performers were being basically forced to work because of contracts and they had little to no control over the outcome.
One of the most famous screwovers that ever happened was the well-known "Montreal Screwjob" where Brett Hart was supposed to win his farewell fight but the owner and the other wrestler in the ring as well as the official that called the match were all in on a secret ploy to not allow Brett the win in front of his hometown crowd in Canada. Even though I have not been involved in wrestling for a long time I remember this happening and it has been the topic of a lot of people giving different versions of the story as to what happened. Even though DSOTR digs into it quite in-depth, there is still no conclusion and it is ambiguous enough that it kind of appears as though this might be a "work" that has been so well-executed that here we are decades later, thinking that it is a great controversy. If it turns out that it was all planned this way and they were just doing a double-switch on the fans, I gotta hand it to them because that is amazing.
In the series we are also introduced over and over again to "kayfabe" which is a term used in wrestling about how the stars never break character and rivalries that appear real in the ring may actually be confrontations between people who are great friends in real life. They keep the illusion going even when they are not in the ring and this extends to their personal lives. We never find out that people like Ric Flair and Sting, who were always bitter rivals, are actually really great friends in their personal lives. This was all very interesting to me and I would imagine that the owners of the various promotions are probably not very happy that things like this are being revealed on a widespread production.
One thing that the series goes very in depth on is the amount of drug abuse that has been, and likely still is taking place in the industry. These monsters simply cannot achieve these physiques with all the travel that they have to do without a little help. The stories of Lex Lugar and Chris Benoit are particularly compelling because their drug use resulted in deaths. Benoit's was something that was really awful because he murdered his entire family before taking his own life.
WWE went to great lengths to bury this story because initially they treated his death as a terrible tragedy including doing a memorial show to him. This was before they found out that he was a murderer and a big time drug abuser. The management at WWE underwent a great deal of scrutiny from this point forward when the toxicology report of Benoit came out and the guy was all over the place with his drug use. There have been many other people that have faced an early death because of drug use where they end up with enlarged hearts and die in their 30's or 40's because they have basically beaten the hell out of their organs for decades at this point.
Even today some of the guys in the ring look as though they definitely have to be doping to achieve such monumental size and the various organizations have established workaround for dealing with the "wellness programs" that they are forced to comply with by having certain big stars be "self-employed contractors" rather than employees. This way, they are not subjected to drug testing. It all seems kind of pointless if they are able to do something like this.
Dark Side of the Ring has a total of 50 episodes and I will admit that not all of them appealed to me because they don't have dirt on just everyone. A lot of the stories that they tell involve people I have never heard of and I ended up simply skipping those because while it might be shocking, I have no idea who Herb Abrams even is, for example.
The commentary is sometimes supplied by Chris Jericho and I am sure Vince McMahaon is just delighted about that.
Should I watch it?
If you don't like wrestling or never did then there is very little chance that you will find this entertaining or even interesting. However, if you were ever a fan and especially if you used to be a fan in the 80's-early 2000's, then this will really float your boat because that is entirely what they focus on. For various legal reasons, there are very few instances where they focus on wrestlers that are currently working. While I really enjoyed this, I cannot give it a full recommendation because people who do not enjoy wrestling will likely find this boring.
