In January 2024, the WWE made a landmark announcement that they had secured a five billion dollar streaming exclusivity deal with Netflix beginning in 2025. The company’s flagship show “Monday Night Raw” will only be able to be streamed through Netflix, and in non-US countries, all WWE content, past and present, will also be available through the service. It begins what is likely to be a very important and lucrative relationship between the two companies.
A mere nine months later, on September 5th, 2024, Netflix released a trailer for a six-part miniseries simply titled “Mr. McMahon”, detailing the life and career of Vincent Kennedy McMahon, the former CEO of the WWE. McMahon is undoubtedly the most influential person ever to be involved in the wrestling sphere, and given his recent allegations of sex trafficking and assault, as well as the uptick in popularity of wrestling as a whole, it seemed like a slam-dunk to have a tell-all documentary exploring behind the scenes and exposing truths.
While first impressions didn’t inspire much hope, such as a promotional poster for the show depicting a boxing ring instead of a wrestling ring, I still had faith – given the staggering amount of in-person interviews involved, including names like John Cena, The Rock and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin – that something interesting had to come out of this. Unfortunately, I was let down.
On first watch, the main question lingering on my mind was “How far deep does the rabbit hole go, and how much will Netflix and the WWE deem acceptable to be shown to the public?”. Given that it is in Netflix’s best interest to promote a positive view of the WWE – since they’re going to be paying them to produce three hours of weekly content – it looked as if this was intended to be more of a puff piece celebrating and recounting the history of McMahon’s company, and unfortunately this seems to be the image portrayed in the finished product. Instead of exploring McMahon’s controversies in further depth, large portions of the series rehash well-known WWE history, such as the Curtain Call and the Montreal Screwjob – stories most wrestling fans have heard countless times.
While these recaps are decent, they often feel more like detours rather than information building towards a picture of McMahon’s life, and sometimes feel like the writers needed something to justify getting all these people to agree to be interviewed without considering whether it added to the main point of the documentary. It doesn’t help that some of the people telling these stories include known exaggerators such as Bruce Pritchard, Eric Bischoff and Hulk Hogan who, while entertaining, don’t give any fan who is looking for accurate information a reason to watch.
Then there comes the issue of what the documentary has to say about Vince McMahon himself. With the show bearing his name, and getting him to sit down in a chair and agree to be interviewed, there is a noticeable lack of new information or insight on display here. There is a great moment where Vince explains how he watched wrestling on TV when he was a child, and found himself enamoured by the villainous Dr. Jerry Graham, a bad guy (a.k.a. “heel”). McMahon would later ride around town with Graham, running red lights and causing trouble, and he states how the experience inspired his own heel character that he would portray after the events of Survivor Series 1997. This is a fascinating insight into why Vince did what he did inside the ring, and what resonated with him during his mostly-unknown childhood.
Unfortunately, the doc is sorely lacking in moments like that, and mostly feels like a rote retelling of past events with little extra substance. Too often an interesting thread is quickly passed over, such as famous ’80s WWE star Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka’s murdering of his girlfriend and McMahon’s alleged involvement in the cover-up, or McMahon potentially intimidating witnesses in his trial over the use of steroids, or Vince’s son Shane attempting to arrange a purchase of UFC in its infancy. These are incredibly important pieces of information that a great documentary would have milked for all they were worth, but here they’re just footnotes, quickly falling by the wayside for a corporate nostalgia session.
However, I can’t critique this documentary without acknowledging that it’s not all Netflix’s fault. Most of the sit-down interview content was filmed in 2021 and 2022, which is incredibly unfortunate timing as the first wave of sexual assault allegations against McMahon occurred in 2022, and a second wave took place in 2024, forcing Netflix’s hand into changing the last 30 minutes of the final episode into an update relating to the case and the investigation. This unfortunately leaves the show with a frustratingly inconclusive ending, as it was obviously rushed and thrown together at the last minute, and seems to lack in detail of the history of sexual assault allegations within the company. McMahon also cancelled his last few interviews with the series after the allegations occurred, leaving the piece without its main focus.
Whether this documentary is worth watching is entirely dependent on how invested you are in the WWE already. If you are a casual wrestling fan, or even just a true-crime enthusiast without any knowledge of wrestling, the content here gets a slight thumbs-up from me. It does an acceptable job of summating the history of the company and McMahon in six hours, and tells it in a decently compelling, stylish way that should appeal to newer fans.
Yet, if you have any type of interest in the true unfiltered history of the WWE, I would not bother with this show besides perhaps the last episode, which reveals some new things about the sexual assault/trafficking allegations. There are better options out there that go further into detail and don’t suffer from pro-WWE bias, such as Vice’s series Dark Side of the Ring or Matthew Randazzo V’s book Ring of Hell, which focuses on the 2007 Chris Benoit murder-suicide case mentioned at the start of episode six.
Ultimately, the most important moment of the show comes early in episode one, just as Vince sits down before giving his first interview. McMahon chuckles to himself and states, “I wish I could tell you the real stories. Holy s***.” Off-camera, the interviewer asks him to tell one. McMahon responds, “No, I don’t want to tell you these stories. I’ll give you enough that it’s semi-interesting. I don’t want anybody to really know me.”
And now, it seems we never will.
