Less than ten minutes into the first episode of the new Netflix docuseries, Mr. McMahon, I logged onto Facebook and declared that it was going to be a “double-shovel burial.” In hindsight, that initial assessment was a bit of an overreaction. The series actually turned out to be a much more nuanced take on the life of Vincent Kennedy McMahon than I had initially believed.
A joint project between the teams behind the viral Netflix hit Tiger King, and the ongoing HBO Sports docuseries 30 For 30, the production on Mr. McMahon began over four years ago. And while it was initially planned as a favorable look into his life and business success, as evidenced by the fact that Vince himself and his entire family participated in and endorsed the project (initially...more on that later), what emerged in the wake of public scandals involving McMahon that came to light since 2022 is at the very least a much more critical look as well as an attempt by the producers and many participants to distance themselves from the controversial old man.
For longtime wrestling fans, particularly the ones who are more dedicated to the point of knowing the history of and the in’s and out’s of the larger wrestling business, there is little to learn here. Most of the information that is presented is old news or well-known wrestling lore. In fact the entire series could have easily been titled “WWE 101.” As such it serves as a very good, if a bit one-sided (due to the choice of talking heads involved) overview of the company that Vince McMahon grew from a large regional promotion into the worldwide juggernaut that it is today. WWE has become something like Band-Aid or Kleenex, a brand name that has become synonymous with the product itself. But if anyone is coming into the series looking for a salacious level of new dirt, they will be disappointed. To be fair, there is dirt (much of it already known and adjudicated in the public arena) and there are also some strong critics of McMahon who were interviewed. One of his strongest and longtime detractors, New York Post writer Phil Mushnick, is given a lot of airtime to tell you just how much of a scumbag he thinks McMahon is.
In the first episode the viewer gets a sense of McMahon's upbringing. For the uninitiated, Vince was initially raised by his mother and a stepfather in a trailer park in North Carolina. When he was twelve-years old, he learned that his real father was the New York City Wrestling promoter Vincent J. McMahon, whose Capitol Wrestling promotion had run shows in Madison Square Garden since the mid twentieth century. Known as the World Wide Wrestling Federation (WWWE), the elder McMahon's promotion was one of the stronger regional powers in the pro-wrestling game. What is missing from the series is any kind of backstory on how McMahon's mother and father met, what the circumstances of his birth and isolation from his father were, or why at the age of twelve did his mother reveal the truth. Vince, both in a past interview for Playboy Magazine, and in his interviews for Mr. McMahon, has revealed a small but controversial part of his upbringing. He has stated that he was physically abused by his stepfather (he has said that one of his great regrets in life is that his stepfather did not live long enough for Vince to kill him), as well as implying (both in the interview and in the doc) that his mother sexually abused him. If true then perhaps the armchair psychiatrists among us can start to understand where much of his creative focus on rage and sex comes from.
Further episodes delve into the history of the WWE, from its origins as the World Wrestling Federation or WWF, created when Vince was able to purchase the company through a sweetheart deal presented to him by his father (he was basically allowed to make payments from the profits he was earning...profits his father would have received anyway had he not sold) and then the younger McMahon began to steer it with his own vision. We are taken through the various “eras” of Rock And Wrestling, Hulkamania, Next Generation, Attitude Era (when the onscreen character of the evil Mr. McMahon was born), Ruthless Aggression, PG-13 and into the current era. We get a good overview of how and why these periods arose, and the relative success or lack thereof of each. The list of talking heads involved is a veritable Who's Who of the business, featuring iconic stars such as Hulk Hogan, Bret Hart, John Cena, Stone Cold Steve Austin, Dwayne The Rock Johnson, The Undertaker, Paul “HHH” Levesque, Eric Bischoff, and a man who emerges as Vince's biggest champion and apologist, Bruce Pritchard (a WWE executive who performed in the 1990's as the Jimmy Swagger-esque manager Brother Love). Also interviewed are the entire McMahon family and many more acclaimed names in Wrestling, Television, and Journalism. The interviews with Vince himself are revealing in a way that I don't think he originally intended, and some of the comments he makes take on an entirely new light in the context of what happened in 2022.
Let's talk about 2022, a year in which a former WWE corporate employee by the name of Janel Grant, filed a lawsuit in federal court accusing McMahon of years-long systematic sexual harassment, abuse, and human trafficking. The complaint was extremely graphic, going into salacious details of the relationship between the two, and was accompanied by a series of text messages purporting to be from McMahon to Grant that seemed to confirm some of the accusations. This lawsuit is still ongoing and has now grown into a larger federal investigation of McMahon. Initially this led to Vince retiring from his position as head of WWE, but he soon used his majority voting power as the major stockholder to perform a hostile takeover of his own company. Once he was back in, he arranged for a nine-billion dollar sale of the WWE to Endeavor Enterprises, the parent company of UFC. A new company, TKO was formed, and Vince was given a prime position as an Executive Director. This was short-lived however, as mounting pressure from the pending suits, as well as revelations of a series of NDA's involving other sex scandals dating back years and even decades, eventually forced him out of the company altogether.
This obviously affected the production of Mr. McMahon. First Vince stopped participating in interviews for the series once these charges were made public. It was also at this time that the producers realized they had a much better story on their hands than a simple look into the life of a wrestling promoter and his promotion. Eventually Vince made an attempt to purchase back the finished product to prevent it from airing but was unsuccessful. And in the respect that WWE itself remained involved, it becomes obvious from the finished product of Mr. McMahon that they now wish to distance themselves from the controversial figure who they owe their very existence to...or at least their new parent company TKO does. Whether or not they succeed remains to be seen.
There is a revealing moment toward the end of the series where McMahon is asked how much he is like the Mr. McMahon character in real life. He states that he isn't like him at all. This is followed by a montage of wrestlers and associates who to-a-person state that the real Vince is very close, if not exactly like Mr. McMahon. This suggests how out of touch Vince is with even those who are closest to him. In the final minutes of the last episode, Bruce Pritchard is shown a rough take of the documentary and asked what he thinks of it. He states that it is “bullshit” and that the producers are aiming to “make Vince look bad”. He then tells a touching story of how Vince supported Pritchard's wife and paid her medical bills when she was stricken with cancer. Bruce seems unable to grasp that someone could be kind to their closest associates while also being a monster to many others. My interpretation from watching the series (in one six-hour binge no less) is that, to the extent that Vince is buried in the series, it comes from his own words and reactions to questions. Keep in mind that he stopped participating in 2022, so anything he says in the documentary comes from before the allegations against him were made public. Yet here he is laughing about a proposed storyline in which he would have been the father of his own daughter Stephanie's unborn child (Stephanie's reaction to the same storyline is quite different as you can imagine), or in a candid moment when asked what he's thinking about at that very second replies, “Something fun involving sex.” Who says things like that?
In the end, if you were a fan of McMahon's, you are forced to consider him in an entirely new light. If you were or are a critic of McMahon's, or think he is a reprehensible person, then you may find the confirmation bias here that you're looking for.