The tagline for Mr. McMahon—the new documentary series from Netflix, Tiger King producer Chris Smith and 30 for 30 creator Bill Simmons—reads “Mastermind. Madman.” It’s only fitting for a biography of a man whose long and horrifying history of alleged sexual abuse and trafficking has become public over the past nine months. The notion of a true crime-style documentary about McMahon—a series whose production began before his public downfall and includes interviews with him, other hard-to-reach WWE stars and executives, and unfettered access to the company’s video library—is very appealing given how protective McMahon and his company have always been of their own image and carefully curated history. However, save for a cumulative, damning hour and a half of this six-part series, Mr. McMahon doesn’t feel much different from the sort of self-congratulating retrospective that WWE regularly pumps out to its fanbase.
The reasons for this are self-evident. When production began on Mr. McMahon, WWE was signed on as a co-producer, implying that—as usual—the company would have a degree of influence over how it and its then-Chairman would be portrayed. WWE has since had its name removed from the credits, and you can certainly imagine why. The company has made every effort to distance themselves from McMahon since the details of Janel Grant’s sex trafficking lawsuit were published, leading to his (hopefully) permanent ouster from the board of parent company TKO. McMahon, who is rumored to have attempted to buy the documentary from Netflix to prevent its release, has published a statement denouncing it as misleading.
Knowing this, one might expect Mr. McMahon to be an incendiary exposé, a final nail in the coffin of the seemingly unkillable beast. And, to someone mostly unfamiliar with McMahon or the world of wrestling at large, perhaps it could be. Sprinkled in amidst the somewhat varnished history of WWE under his leadership are brief accounts of his alleged rape of referee Rita Chatterton in 1986, his alleged blind eye to a pedophile ring under his watch in the early 80s, and insinuations of many more crimes and misdeeds. The final 20 minutes of the series provides a quick summation of McMahon’s initial resignation from WWE in 2022, his return in 2023, and permanent removal in 2024 after Janel Grant’s allegations were published. (Grant herself does not appear in the documentary, which is unsurprising as her lawsuit is ongoing.) For anyone already acquainted with McMahon, his business practices, and the allegations against him, there’s not a lot of new information.
The series on the whole posits, over time, that the soulless, cutthroat, rapacious evil businessman he portrayed on WWE television for decades is not so much a character as a caricature. His WWE persona is simply avatar for his darkest, most dramatic self—as many of the best wrestling personas are—but it provides a sort of cover for his real-life sins. It’s a scapegoat, a means of controlling his own image, willfully distorting the barrier between truth and fiction so that tales of his revolting personal conduct can be easily misattributed to his on-screen counterpart. Mr. McMahon makes this argument very well.
At the same time, at least as much of the series is spent parroting WWE’s own familiar version of wrestling history, in which McMahon single-handedly reshaped the business from niche, lowbrow entertainment to a mainstream enterprise worth billions. Here, Vince goes away on vacation in 1984 and comes back with the revolutionary idea for a huge annual show on closed circuit called WrestleMania, with no mention of rival WCW’s similar supercard, Starcade, which had debuted the year prior. The series includes the umpteenth nearly identical retelling of the Monday Night War between WWF and WCW, and of the infamous Montreal Screwjob in which McMahon stripped the title from departing champion Bret Hart. Segments on events WWE generally does not speak of, like the tragic death of Owen Hart on pay-per-view and the Chris Benoit murder-suicide, are explored in far less detail here than on Vice’s docuseries Dark Side of the Ring.
Mr. McMahon may be the victim of shifting expectations. After all, during its production, the intent of this series was likely not to create an unvarnished portrait of an alleged sexual predator. More likely, it was to use the eccentric hypercapitalist as a lens through which to explore the history of pro wrestling. Perhaps the storytellers found the ugly side of McMahon as production rolled on, and the news cycle simply got ahead of them, robbing the documentary of its shock value. It’s also essential to note that Netflix recently spent $5 billion for the rights to broadcast WWE programming live for the next decade and has a vested interest in the company’s reputation.
It’s hard to say whether Mr. McMahon would be a riveting watch for someone uninitiated in pro wrestling, but anyone watching should keep the following in mind: With the exception of the handful of journalists who appear as talking heads, the people who provide testimony in this documentary are among the best salesmen in the world. They have made millions off their ability to package their version of reality as entertainment. When they are speaking, you must always assume that you’re being worked. But in the few precious moments when the masks appear to slip, you may experience what it is to be a wrestling fan, to willingly submerge yourself in a world of pretty lies, constantly grasping for truth.
