Netflix’s Mr. McMahon Doesn’t Fully Grapple with Vince McMahon’s Legacy

Wrestling fans have been desperate for details on Mr. McMahon ever since it was first announced almost four years ago. Produced by Bill Simmons of 30 for 30 and The Ringer fame, and directed by Tiger King producer and American Movie director Chris Smith, Mr. McMahon is the first biography of wrestling impresario Vince McMahon to be made with the cooperation of WWE, the industry-dominating wrestling company McMahon ran for 42 years until stepping down in disgrace earlier this year. Crucially, it was announced that McMahon and WWE wouldn’t have editorial control over the film, despite cooperating with its production; given McMahon’s Trumpian history of lying about himself and his company, and his attempts to control every facet of his company and its press coverage to a minute detail, this meant Mr. McMahon would be the incredibly rare piece of media that would have access to McMahon and WWE and also the freedom to portray them in an honest light. With the sordid history of McMahon and the wrestling industry in general, it seemed Mr. McMahon had the potential to open some eyes.

Having seen the show, I can say that it might. But not those of wrestling fans, who have spent the last few decades collectively obsessed over McMahon, his industry-reshaping hubris, his genius on-screen character, and the batshit tales of his real-life, behind-the-scenes sociopathy. The hardcore wrestling fan who has consumed backstage news and rumors, “shoot” interviews with old wrestlers, shows like Dark Side of the Ring, and countless message board posts won’t learn anything new about Vince McMahon, his immediate family (all of whom have worked prominently for WWE), or his company. And the one major story Mr. McMahon could have expanded on, the ongoing lawsuit accusing McMahon of sex trafficking and assault, broke late in the show’s production; it’s covered in more than one episode, but not with the depth or access you might hope for. 

So yes: Mr. McMahon isn’t for the wrestling fan who can recite every WWE World champion in order, or who watches 10 hours of wrestling from around the globe every week. Fans who haven’t been watching for decades, who aren’t familiar with the man behind WWE and the Mr. McMahon character, and who aren’t cursed (as I am) with an unquenchable lifelong thirst for pro wrestling knowledge, might learn a lot from Mr. McMahon. (Tellingly, my wife, who watched it with me and largely doesn’t care about wrestling, enjoyed and respected it a good bit more than I do.) Still, although much of it isn’t flattering, the show doesn’t paint a damning enough portrayal of Vince McMahon.

To understand how the version of Mr. McMahon that starts streaming this week came to be, you need to understand the nature and timing of its production. It was originally announced in October 2020, over a year before McMahon was accused of multiple allegations of sexual harassment and abuse. In June 2022, the year most of the doc’s interviews were conducted, it was revealed that McMahon had paid four women $12 million in hush money over sexual misconduct; he temporarily resigned as the company’s CEO, before returning at the start of 2023 and overseeing the company’s merger with the UFC. In January 2024 he was sued for sexual abuse and sex trafficking by Janel Grant, a former WWE employee who was one of the four women who received payments in 2022; McMahon had broken the terms of their deal by stopping payment after the first installment, and so Grant went public with her allegations, which are extremely graphic and disturbing. McMahon was quickly ousted from WWE’s new parent company TKO, and has become persona non grata within the company he ran for over 40 years, and which he has long been synonymous with. These weren’t the first sexual allegations against McMahon, but they were the most recent and most publicized, and they all happened while Mr. McMahon was deep into active production.

On top of that, Grant’s lawsuit was filed literally two days after WWE announced a massive, industry-changing, long term television deal with Netflix, who will pay WWE $10 billion to air the company’s main show Raw internationally for the next decade. It was filed two days after Dwayne Johnson, the wrestler-turned-Hollywood-megastar known as The Rock, returned to WWE as a member of TKO’s board, and became a recurring on-air character for the first time in over a decade. What was supposed to be one of the best weeks in WWE’s history took a turn when McMahon’s disgusting alleged actions were exposed. 

At that point it became fair to wonder if Mr. McMahon would ever actually see release. Would Netflix run a truthful documentary about the alleged sex trafficker who, for 42 years, was the key figure and ironhanded ruler of their new multibillion dollar partner—and whose most recent allegations were supposedly investigated by the WWE’s board when they initially surfaced in 2022, which means certain current executives at WWE should have known all the details about Grant’s case well before they went public, and before McMahon returned from his first resignation? Would WWE or the McMahon family still participate in such a project after these damning allegations? Would Simmons, Smith, and the show’s other creators be able to fit these latest developments into this deep-in-production series—and would Netflix even let them in the first place?

I’ve seen all six episodes, and Mr. McMahon clearly struggles with how the news impacted its production. It addresses Janel Grant’s lawsuit from the jump, devoting much of the first episode to it, including interviews with the Wall Street Journal reporters who broke the news, Ted Mann and Joe Palazzolo, before circling back to the story in the final episode. It also states at the start that almost all of the show’s interviews were conducted before any of the allegations went public, that the interview sessions with McMahon himself predated the 2022 accusations, and that McMahon and his family refused follow-up interviews after the Grant lawsuit was filed in 2024. (Other than three Wall Street Journal reporters, it seems like the only people to be interviewed again in 2024, after the Grant lawsuit, were wrestling journalist Dave Meltzer and longtime WWE employee Bruce Prichard, who doesn’t say anything about the lawsuit.) Grant also declined to be interviewed for the series, with her lawyer noting, understandably, that she deserved to tell her own story at a time of her choosing. Through no fault of its own Mr. McMahon has to work around a giant hole in the middle of its most important story; it’s fully aware and open about McMahon’s trafficking allegations, but because none of the figures in the lawsuit are interviewed about them, the show simply repeats the news without exploring or interrogating it. Clearly its producers and Netflix knew it would be cowardly and embarrassing to release a series about McMahon’s life that didn’t deal with the alleged crimes that shattered whatever remained of his reputation, but the way the show addresses them is perfunctory and insufficient. 

Worse, Mr. McMahon’s larger coverage of WWE’s history of sexism, exploitation, and disrespectful treatment of its female stars is similarly hamstrung by a lack of first-person perspective. Several prominent WWE stars from throughout its history pop up to talk about Vince and his company, but very few of them are women. Wendi Richter, the company’s top women’s wrestler during its initial mid ‘80s heyday, talks about how underpaid she was, and the infamous real-life screwjob that got the women’s title off of her as her relationship with the company collapsed. Trish Stratus, a top star from the so-called “Attitude Era” who debuted with the company in 2000, discusses a notorious storyline in which Mr. McMahon threatened to fire her if she didn’t strip down to her underwear in the middle of the ring in a packed arena and bark like a dog; that same story saw McMahon’s wife Linda, the former CEO of WWE (and eventual member of Trump’s cabinet), wheeled around in a drugged stupor by her nurse Stratus, who was also Vince’s mistress. The “bark like a dog” segment is one of the most uncomfortable and indefensible things McMahon ever aired on a WWE show, but other than being annoyed at constantly being asked about it, Stratus largely brushes off concerns about the story today. It’s easy to view storylines like this—and a later one in which Sable, the biggest sex symbol of WWE’s Attitude Era, returned after years away to become Mr. McMahon’s latest mistress—as potential glimpses into McMahon’s real-life sexual misconduct, but Mr. McMahon only presents arguments through interviews, and that point largely goes unmentioned. In real life, as the series notes, Sable left WWE acrimoniously in 1999, filing a $110 million sexual harassment lawsuit, before returning a few years later. She isn’t interviewed in Mr. McMahon; today she’s married to WWE megastar and former UFC champ Brock Lesnar, who was mentioned in Janel Grant’s lawsuit as the recipient of explicit images of Grant sent by Vince McMahon.  

Perhaps the producers reached out to other women who have worked for WWE, and they declined to be interviewed, as happened with Grant. That wouldn’t be a surprise: wrestlers have long been afraid to openly criticize Vince McMahon or WWE, even after they’ve been mistreated by the company, because it’s long been the only way to make a truly good living through wrestling outside of a few promotions in Japan and Mexico. No matter the reason, it’s a glaring problem with the series. Almost all of the wrestlers it talks to are men, and almost all of them have little negative to say about McMahon.

That isn’t to say that Mr. McMahon avoids sensitive subjects, or doesn’t challenge McMahon’s statements at times. In the episode about the height of Hulkamania in the ‘80s, McMahon and Hulk Hogan repeat the same lies they’ve told about WrestleMania III for years—that there were 93,173 people in the building, that nobody had ever beaten or body slammed Andre the Giant before, that Hogan didn’t even know if he was going to win the match until it started because Andre hadn’t agreed to the finish. Mr. McMahon then does something you hardly ever see in documentaries about WWE history: it refutes every one of those claims, with journalist Dave Meltzer ticking off how each one was bullshit, with video footage showing other wrestlers, including Hogan himself, body slamming Andre years before WrestleMania III. The show also points out the hypocrisy of McMahon’s complaints against Ted Turner and WCW during the mid ‘90s Monday Night Wars; Eric Bischoff, WCW’s president, lured away a handful of WWE’s biggest stars with big money contracts, with McMahon painting Turner as a billionaire with a vendetta intent on crushing a “small” family business. Of course, McMahon built the then-WWF into the industry-dominating force it became by raiding territories in the 1980s and signing away their biggest stars. At one point the interviewer point-blank asks McMahon how he can square his criticisms of Turner with his own actions in the ‘80s, and although he can’t say why they’re supposedly different, an awkward McMahon still maintains that they weren’t the same thing. Mr. McMahon is the only wrestling documentary you’ll see that not only has Vince McMahon talking at length about his life and career, but will then question McMahon about some of the bullshit he consistently spews.

Bob Costas, who appeared on some WWE shows in the ‘80s, is a regular talking head, criticizing the company for becoming increasingly tawdry and salacious in the ‘90s, and for McMahon revealing himself to be a traditional wrestling carnie and bully instead of the canny, savvy marketer Costas once thought he was. Their relationship culminates in an infamous interview between the two on Costas’s HBO talk show in 2001, where a raving, deranged McMahon clearly wants to attack Costas. As so often happened when Vince McMahon was publicly challenged by mainstream figures, he comes off terribly, and it’s still embarrassing to watch today. Costas, meanwhile, continues to openly laugh off McMahon’s bluster, rightly treating the wrestling promoter with complete disdain. 

Mr. McMahon also digs into the many scandals that broke within the company in the early ‘90s. If you’re unfamiliar with what’s known as the Ring Boy Scandal—where WWE employees were soliciting sexual favors from the local teenagers they’d use to help set up and break down their rings—Mr. McMahon covers it in detail, with period news coverage and 2022 interviews with many of the employees who were around in the ‘80s and early ‘90s. The existential threat of the ‘90s steroid scandal, and its impact on the company, the McMahon family, and Hulk Hogan, is also detailed, as is 1980s referee Rita Chatterton’s 1992 rape accusation against McMahon. Phil Mushnick, a New York Post writer who has long been one of the few mainstream reporters to regularly investigate and write about McMahon and his numerous scandals, is quoted regularly throughout the series, something that would never happen in a show that WWE had control over. Together Mushnick, Meltzer, and Costas unintentionally make up a defensive line against McMahon’s lies, with Mushnick disputing almost everything McMahon says, Meltzer regularly setting the historical record straight, and Costas giving us a glimpse of the contempt with which the mainstream sports world has long viewed McMahon.

Again, though, none of this is new information if you’ve long followed McMahon’s career. And so much of the rest of the documentary is just a straight accounting of facts—“this happened, and then this happened, and then that happened” as told largely by Vince, Linda, their children Stephanie (who long seemed Vince’s heir apparent) and Shane (the first-born and only son, who was lapped internally by his younger sister in the 2000s and has felt like the closest thing the McMahons have to an outsider despite working for them for 20 years and returning as a wrestler in the 2010s), and their son-in-law Paul LeVesque, who wrestled as Triple H and is now the chief content officer and head of creative for WWE. (Along with WWE president Nick Khan, LeVesque is one of those WWE board members who investigated and reinstated McMahon after the 2022 allegations, and who presumably were aware of the details of Grant’s case.) Other than Shane briefly talking about the challenges of being Vince’s son—a rare and compelling look into family dynamics that have long been conjectured about by wrestling fans but rarely discussed by the family—the McMahons generally pose a unified front, offering only previously known or surface-level info about their patriarch. 

Despite the magnitude and amount of McMahon’s various scandals over the decades, most of Mr. McMahon is a linear account of WWE history that will be familiar to anybody who has watched wrestling since the ‘80s or read anything about it. McMahon’s interviews don’t add that much, as his slanted, self-aggrandizing take on wrestling history has been well established through WWE’s own productions. If you aren’t already deeply familiar with how WrestleMania came about, the Montreal Screwjob, the Monday Night Wars, or Owen Hart’s death, you might learn a lot, and with more truth to it than what you’d get from a WWE-produced documentary. (You won’t learn much at all about Chris Benoit; it just assumes everybody knows about that, which probably isn’t a bad call.) If you are, though, it’s just one more recount of the highs and lows of McMahon’s career, with minimal new information or insight. 

The only part of McMahon’s life that it delves into that hasn’t been exhaustively detailed over the years is his youth, and even there Mr. McMahon isn’t as in-depth or probing as Josephine Riesman’s 2023 biography Ringmaster. Riesman talked to some of McMahon’s childhood friends and neighbors, whose memories didn’t quite match up with McMahon’s tales of being a teenaged punk and street fighter. Mr. McMahon doesn’t question its subject’s self-mythology, with only his wife Linda providing any additional insight into his formative years, while still pushing the same image of Vince as a poor, small-town roughneck raised in an abusive family in North Carolina, who was tamed by his relationship with his well-raised high school sweetheart Linda and the summers he spent with his wrestling promoter father in New York City, who he never knew about until he was 12.

Getting to the truth of Vince McMahon’s life was obviously going to be a lot harder than body slamming Andre the Giant. We’re talking about the most committed and accomplished liar in an industry literally built on lies, who’s also a domineering control freak who loves to bully and embarrass his employees, and who openly loses it whenever he’s called out in public. The value of McMahon consenting to an interview in a project he isn’t producing and doesn’t have control over lies solely in how well that project responds to his transparent distortions and endless self-praise. (Again: there’s a reason Vince McMahon and Donald Trump are real-life friends; they’re basically the same guy.) Smith, Simmons and their team do a better job at that than anybody who has had access to McMahon has done in the past, but Mr. McMahon still has some major issues. It might be a fairly comprehensive look at McMahon’s career year by year, but despite its six hour runtime and copious amounts of interviews, it doesn’t dig deeply enough into the man himself. His victims go underrepresented—which, again, is absolutely their right and understandable given the horrors they were allegedly subjected to, but it means the show is missing a crucial perspective. It’s often jarring how quickly the show can go from discussing McMahon’s sociopathic actions to focusing on WWE’s business and entertainment success. Mr. McMahon wants to be an all-encompassing dissection of a uniquely successful and sleazy predator, but that man’s life proves to be too sordid, too weird, and too tangled to fully crack, even after six hours. McMahon’s the most important figure in the history of a incredibly lucrative industry that, with roots in the mid 19th century, has been around for far longer than many people realize, but he’s also a monster who ruined lives, preyed upon his employees, and made it hard to make a living in this industry for anybody but himself, his family, his office workers, and the wrestlers who fit his narrow concept of what a pro wrestling star could be. Nobody did more to make pro wrestling a multibillion dollar business, and nobody did more to limit and diminish that business and artform overall. And that pales in comparison to what he allegedly did to Janel Grant, to Rita Chatterton, to the other women who accused him of abuse, and to all the victims of the various scandals that festered at WWE under Vince McMahon’s watch since 1982. Mr. McMahon fails to paint a full portrait of the man, or to fully contend with the negative impact he’s had on so many. And interviewing him doesn’t add much of value; unlike Robert Durst, McMahon’s facade won’t crack, and he’s too good and experienced of a liar to ever reveal or admit to anything that doesn’t fit his chosen set of facts. Vince McMahon’s life defies a conventional documentary because there’s nothing conventional about his malignant, destructive, half-real and half-fictional life, and that means something like Mr. McMahon was basically doomed from the start.

About our score: Mr. McMahon is a 7.5 out of 10 for people who aren’t deeply familiar with wrestling history, and a 5.0 for people who are. So we averaged it out.

Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, comedy, travel, theme parks, wrestling, and more. He’s also on Twitter @grmartin.