Dark Side of the Ring returns tonight on Vice with its fourth season, once again diving into the many controversies and tragedies of the pro wrestling industry. One person that consistently pops up throughout Dark Side’s episodes is Vince McMahon, which is unsurprising given how massive his presence in the business and influence has been for decades. Some fans of the show have done so far as to refer to McMahon as the “Thanos” of the series, comparing his frequent involvement in episodes to how the character popped up throughout the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s “Infinity Saga.” It’s a comparison that the show’s co-creator Evan Husney tends to agree with.
“I get that. I’ve heard that, too, Vince McMahon is the ‘MCU supervillain of the Dark Side Universe,’” Husney said. “I think, honestly, that is more coincidence than anything we intended because, when we set out to do the show, Season One and Two, we made each season like we were never going to get another one. We just were like boom, boom, boom, let’s hit them all, because Season Two is stacked with big stories.
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“And I think the bigger stories in wrestling, who’s always there, who is always either pulling the strings or who’s in the backstage, who’s a big part of this story, and Vince is always a part of it. And I think it was a little eye-opening… Vince is the through line, but it was more just setting out to tackle the biggest stories we could possibly get access to, and then, yeah, Vince is always there, man,” he added.
But for as many times as McMahon has popped up, fans are still waiting on a McMahon-centric episode related to his recent scandals. The closest the series got was when Vice released The Nine Lives of Vince McMahon last October, which spliced together many of McMahon’s appearances in previous Dark Side of the Ring stories before briefly recapping his “retirement” from WWE last year in the wake of numerous sexual misconduct allegations. By the end of the year, McMahon had approached the WWE’s Board of Directors demanding he be reinstated as executive chairman and threatened to use his voting power to block any sale or media rights deals if his demands weren’t met. He was reinstated in early 2023.
When asked if the show would tackle the misconduct allegations that nearly forced McMahon out of the industry, Huseny pointed out that McMahon’s story likely isn’t over.
“…The way that I look at these modern stories is, at least with most of the stories we’ve covered on the show, there’s the benefit of hindsight or so much time has gone by. The story’s done, the story’s ‘finished.’ So we can really get into it and try to unpack it,” he said.
“These stories that pop up, just in the last year or two, those are stories that are not really done being told, I feel like,” he added. “And so I think that, who knows, I think we might have to wait a few years, maybe even more, before we can really dive in and unpack and truly begin to understand every aspect of that story.”
Dark Side of the Ring Season 4 premieres tonight at 10 p.m. ET on Vice. Stay tuned for ongoing coverage of the season!
