Is Kayfabe dead? Netflix frustratingly doesn’t appear to think so…
He’s possibly the most reviled, renowned and to some, revered man in professional wrestling. He himself wouldn’t even call the industry by that terminology. Professional wrestling be damned, when it comes to WWE and Vince McMahon, the correct lexicon is and always will be Sports Entertainment. For better or worse both the man and company do things their own way. Stubborn, controversial and over the top.
No matter what you call it, the industry is hot again. Maybe not as hot as it was in the eighties or late nineties, but professional wrestling is entering the mainstream consciousness in a big way once again.
Enter Netflix
For over ten years, WWE programming and its steeped back catalogue has remained somewhat self contained. But in 2025 that will change with the company moving its flagship show, Raw, to Netflix. Outside the USA, all other programming and content will also move to the streaming giant.
Before that historic moment, Netflix has begun to whet the appetite and churn out wrestling content. It’s not like there isn’t some history there. GLOW was one of the company’s first big hitters. Documentary series Wrestlers, tested well with fans and it even created a niche dramatisation, The Queen of Villains, focussing on Japanese wrestler Dump Matsumoto.
So after investing $5 billion into a 10 year rights deal, you’d think Netflix would be keen to build up the arrival of one of their biggest ever investments. That may have been the case when Netflix originally announced they would be producing a documentary series on the life and times of WWE’s founder Vincent Kennedy McMahon.
Simply titled Mr McMahon after the character Vince so readily played each week on WWE programming for years, the series was originally slated to get behind the skin of one of the most polarising men in the industry.
Then the very serious accusations against Vince, some of his associates and WWE emerged earlier this year. Janel Grant, a former WWE employee filed a lawsuit in January 2024, alleging sexual misconduct and sex trafficking against the organisation, its former CEO and its head of talent relations John Laurinaitis.
This background is important when attempting to critically evaluate and review the Mr. McMahon series. Why? Because the streaming giant has cultivated a rich history of shocking and absorbing documentaries unafraid to ask difficult questions.
Sadly this particular series is neither of the former adjectives and falls short in the latter category.
Formulaic
Throughout its six episode arc, Vince himself is interviewed and quizzed about his childhood, buying his father’s company, various lawsuits over the years and the debuts of some of the biggest names in WWE history.
Mix in some backstories about the first WrestleMania, the Monday Night Wars, The Montreal Screwjob and you have a fairly robust history of WWE.
And so we reach the first big question. What was the purpose of this series? To allow the subject an opportunity to lift the lid on some of the biggest scandals that surrounded his company in his own words? To create even a sliver of sympathy for a man currently considered persona non grata by the very company he built?
With each passing episode Mr. McMahon falls short of delivering any answers to those questions and instead delivers a bloated puff piece that barely scratches the surface of someone who created a beloved world of larger than life characters while allegedly participating in some heinous crimes.
This is a documentary series that could just as easily have been produced by WWE/TKO’s own production team and slapped on the WWE Network. Any expectation of a gotcha moment is blown out of the water just four and a half minutes into the first episode when Vince himself delivers the line, “I wish I could tell you the real stories. Holy shit. I’ll give you enough that it’s semi interesting. I don’t want anybody to really know me!” Before delivering a smile.
Boy, he wasn’t lying. The majority of the information shared in the 342 minute running time won’t be of much interest to wrestling fans that will have heard it all before. The events mentioned have been covered by both WWE and Vince in previous documentaries.
Where the series does hold some weight is when Vince is pushed to talk about his family and the more personal side of his life. His relationship with his father, his wife Linda, son Shane and daughter Stephanie.
Sympathy For The Devil’s Son?
It is Shane McMahon that emerges as the sympathetic character of the story. Collateral damage to a father that himself admits you either continue the cycle or break it and astonishingly chooses the former.
Somehow amongst the shock and awe of the other scandals Vince McMahon has been embroiled in, it is the treatment of his son, so desperate for his father’s respect he’d risk his own body time and time again that proves most heartbreaking.
Paul Heyman recalling a story of Vince goading Shane with a knife and telling him he’ll have to kill him to get his hands on the company like he would have done to his own father, tells you everything you need to know about how the McMahons live behind the curtain.
Despite a veritable who’s who of talking heads lending their voices and opinions on McMahon, all of them ultimately admit they don’t really know the man, just the character he wants them to see. A more focussed lens on that particular strand of thinking could have sharpened the delivery of a messy series.
It’s difficult to understand who this was aimed at. Wrestling fans will gain very little. The general public might not find nearly six hours of wrestling history that interesting and when it comes to the most recent accusations, some words on a screen reveal Vince cut ties and refused to complete any further interviews.
That is understandable when you are in the midst of a legal battle and federal investigation. Which perhaps leads to the biggest question viewers might be left with. Why now Netflix?
WWE is hot right now. They are preparing to move to a streaming platform that has just trudged up tough questions about its founder and former owner that will forever be intrinsically tied to its history. The documentary admittedly kicks up a gear in the last 30 minutes when it begins to delve into who Vince McMahon really is.
But surely with so much money at stake, Netflix would have been much better placed to release this series once the current scandal and accusations have seen their day in court? One way or another we then could have actually learnt something real about Vince McMahon. They could have used this chance to separate the man from the company once and for all.
Instead, like wrestling fans so often have to, we are left to ponder a familiar question. Where does the bombastic, over the top character begin and the person behind it end? Just don’t look for the answer here…
