AEW's Jim Ross Says He'll No Longer Appear on Dark Side of the Ring

By Connor Casey

Jim Ross has frequently appeared on Dark Side of the Ring across its first three seasons, commenting on topics such as The Plane Ride From Hell, The Brawl For All and the deaths of WWE stars like Owen Hart and Chris Benoit. However, Ross said on the latest Grilling JR podcast that he'll no longer appear on the show due to issues with how some of his comments have been edited. Neither of the series' creators — Jason Eisener and Evan Husney — have commented publicly on Ross' comments as of this writing. 

"It's mixed. I have some problems with some Dark Side editing. I thought I was misrepresented a time or two in the edit," Ross said (h/t WrestlingNews.co). "But I mean, I admire those guys' entrepreneurial spirit and I think it's a good purpose, but I think sometimes they bite into the apple of the dirt. They narrowcast a little bit too much for me, but I'm still going to watch their shows."

"I'm not sure I'll be on any more of them simply because I had such unfortunate negative afterthoughts of it, but you know, you never know," he continued. "Those guys are good guys and they mean well, but I think the edit was a little bit callous and not well thought out quite frankly. So I hope they continue to do those shows, and if they do, I'll continue to watch and we'll see. They should get better at what they do."

In an interview with ComicBook last year, Husney talked about the role Dark Side now takes in the pro wrestling culture. He said, "Well I think for me and for the show, I think even out of the gate when we had established Dark Side of the Ring as the name of the show, we were a little hesitant at first. We really needed a name for the show and we were running out of time, but I think when we settled on that, it was...It's a name you remember, but at the same time we were worried we didn't want it just to be too limiting to be like, 'Okay, we're just exploiting tragedies now,' and that. We really wanted because that's not really what we're about in terms of storytelling. We really wanted our show to be an empathetic look at what wrestlers and family members have gone through and hopefully this can be a platform for good and hopefully it can inspire people and people can learn things from these stories and it's not just all about the darkness. And as we move forward out of season three, if there is a season four, we have to think about maybe broadening that spectrum as well. But to us, we never would have dreamed it. When we were just doing the Brody episode and putting this together, we never would've thought that this could be bringing families closer together and it could be spotlighting unsung heroes like (Brian Pillman Jr.'s aunt) Linda and things like that.

"And we see it with Nick Gage's career too, in a totally other capacity. We're seeing Nick Gage wrestling our narrator (Chris Jericho) live on television. Again, we're sort of seeing the power of this platform and it is humbling to us and it's something we have to check ourselves with too as it grows. So, yeah. It's been a wild ride for sure," he added.

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