Dark Side of the Ring has reportedly not been picked up for a fourth season, ending its run on VICE TV at 30 episodes across three seasons. The documentary, created by Evan Husney and Jason Eisener, centered around some of the darkest chapters in the pro wrestling business, ranging from the deaths of Bruiser Brody, Chris Benoit and Owen Hart to the WWE Steroid Trials and the infamous “Plane Ride From Hell.”
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Update: Following this story’s publication, VICE sent out the following statement on Twitter — “We’ve heard some rumors flying around about Season 4 of Dark Side of the Ring. We are as committed as ever to both the series and the broader Dark Side franchise.Evan and Jason are hard at work making more content that we know our fans of the series will love. Stay tuned.”
According to Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer, Husney and Eisener’s next project will involve them teaming up with Dwayne Johnson’s Seven Bucks Productions for a new series centering around the territory era of pro wrestling in the United States. A new territory will be focussed on each week, with comparisons being made to the format of WWE’s Table for 3.
Husney and Eisener talked with ComicBook before the second half of the show’s third season dropped, in which they talked about the prominence the show had built up within the wrestling community.
“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,” Husney said. “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 Linda and things like that,” he continued. “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.”
