Vice’s Dark Side of the Ring has been a staple of the pro wrestling community since the documentary series first debuted back in April 2019. However, between Season 3’s controversial “Plane Ride From Hell” episode, a lack of a new season in 2022 and rumors that WWE might have used its connection with A&E (which partially owns Vice) to try and cancel the series, speculation that the show had been canceled popped up frequently throughout the past year. This was all while the show’s co-creators Evan Husney and Jason Eisener kept stating in interviews (including one with ComicBook) that the show was alive and well.ย
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The series returns for its fourth season tonight on Vice, kicking off with the episode “Chris and Tammy” centering around Chris Candido and Tammy Lynn Sytch, better known as WWE Hall of Famer Sunny. Husney spoke with ComicBook prior to the premiere and addressed all the speculation that surrounded the series in-between its third and fourth seasons.ย
“It’s always fun to me, from a wrestling fan perspective, to now be a part of the wrestling rumor mill, if you will. Now, I see what a lot of the wrestlers go through when speculation winds up snowballing into fact,” Husney said. He then explained that Tales From The Territories, another wrestling-based Husney & Eisener production that premiered on Vice in 2022, got the green light while Season Three wasn’t even halfway through production.
“We had this opportunity, we’d been developing it for years with Seven Bucks and with Dwayne Johnson’s crew, and we just wanted to make it. And I think it was somewhere in that line where it was like, ‘Okay, we had a controversial moment in Season Three,’ but then it’s like, when you start to think about the (speculation)… that doesn’t make sense. If a show’s doing well and it’s because it’s controversial, it’s going to be canceled. This doesn’t make any sense,” he continued. “So I think it was that rumor speculation snowball effect that led to a lot of people thinking, ‘Well, maybe it’s canceled. I heard it’s canceled’ Unless there’s something that I don’t know, which maybe is possible, that was never the case.”
By “controversial moment,” Husney was referring to the “Plane Ride From Hell” episode, which featured a flight attendant accusing Ric Flair of sexual assault. The episode saw Flair get briefly scrubbed from WWE programming, while Tommy Dreamer’s comments defending Flair saw him receive a temporary suspension from Impact Wrestling. Flair has repeatedly denied the accusations.ย
“For me, it revealed a lot about the process of us and, as a documentary production, walking a line, if you will, with the wrestling community,” Husney said regarding the reaction to that episode. “I think that, in the wrestling world, there is this very black-or-white binary look at how wrestling is portrayed in media and in documentary form, and even in wrestling. It’s like either you’re putting somebody over or you’re burying them and there’s no in-between.
“I think folks, fans, wrestlers, etc, can get confused on the purpose of what we’re trying to do or other documentary series that are covering wrestling. It’s we’re just trying to tell the story of what happened. It’s not our job to put somebody over or to bury anybody. That’s not the way we go to work in the morning when we set out to do things. We’re being led by the story and the story that we’re looking into or how people are framing it for us on camera,” he continued. “And so I think that was a time where it got pretty controversial. I think some people who were involved in the episode started to walk back from it, distance (themselves) from that. But to me, it was really eye-opening in terms of that factor, is like we’re not making commercials here, we’re not making a wrestling program, we’re telling a story in a documentary.”
The future of the series was called into question yet again recently when Vice Media filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy earlier this month. However, Husney confirmed that he and Eisener intend to keep producing the series and that Season 4 was not viewed as a finale.ย
“No (this isn’t the end),” Husney said. “We definitely want to keep the show going. We love making the show and we love telling these stories. With Tales from the Territories, we had such a fun time just rediscovering our love for the territory era, that Kayfabe era. We just loved that so much. And I think that’s carried over into Dark Side (Season) Four. There’s a lot of territory era stories, Magnum TA, Junkyard Dog, Adrian Adonis. You got all those. So that definitely inspired that. So we’re exploring that and there’s more to explore.
“I think, what you’re reading about Vice right now, I think the good news is … Obviously, I’m not an official … someone who can comment on behalf of the company or anything, but from what’s been explained to me, it’s business as usual,” he continued. “Vice TV, the TV channel, the entity, that’s a separate entity from Vice Media. So we’re good to go and we want to keep going and we have plans to.”
Dark Side of the Ring Season 4 premieres tonight at 10 p.m. ET on Vice. Stay tuned for ongoing coverage of the season!ย
