Welcome to another eWrestlingNews Question of the Day!
By now, all the episodes of the Netflix Mr. McMahon documentary are out there and there have been a few days where you might have had an opportunity to check it out.
My question for you today is another simple and straightforward one: “What are your thoughts on the documentary? If you didn’t watch it, why is that?”
Remember to answer with your response in the comments below.
As far as my answer…
At the time I’m writing this, I’ve only had the ability to watch an episode and a half of it. I was hoping to binge it all as quickly as possible, but life gets in the way and I had to prioritize other things. In part, that’s just the way things go—but to be honest, I didn’t get wowed enough by this documentary yet that made me so itching to revisit it that I decided to put other stuff on the back burner and make this my priority, either.
Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t bad. I’m still interested in continuing to watch it and to see what else they explore. But so far, there hasn’t been much that has opened my eyes to anything new. I’m far from the best wrestling historian out there, but I’m familiar with everything enough that the topics they’ve talked about were largely just a rehashing of things I’ve watched other documentaries or read numerous other reports and interviews about. How many times can I hear the story about how Vince McMahon bet everything on WrestleMania and how big of a deal Andre the Giant versus Hulk Hogan was, for instance?
But there were still a few moments here and there that made me laugh or caught my attention, and most importantly, it’s been fun watching this with my wife. She’s aware of some of these things just by proxy of me telling her stories over the years, but she’s not tapped into it like any of us. I wouldn’t even call her a fan by association; she more so just tolerates my annoying ass watching this garbage around her haha. But it’s been keeping her attention and she’s been enjoying the documentary, having some great reactions to various things. I now know that I need to get her to watch No Holds Barred, for instance, as the horrified look on her face during the “Doooookie” line and her “What the f*ck??” response is a great indication it’ll be hilarious to watch that with her. But it’s always more interesting to see these things through the eyes of someone coming across it for the first time, and when certain scandals are brought up and she’s reacting to it, it gives me insight more into what Netflix was going for.
You see, this is definitely not for the super avid crowd that would know all these stories. It’s for the more casual or even completely unaware audience that needs to be told these things for the first time or they’re aware of some of it, but don’t know the ins and outs. On that front, it seems to be doing a solid job, even if it does romanticize some elements the way that there’s a revisionist history about a lot of professional wrestling (and, let’s face it, everything else in life).
I can’t say that I’m loving it as much as I was hoping, nor do I think it’s as biting of a piece as I had hoped for, but I do think it’s proving itself (so far, at least) to be a worthwhile series for people to check out.
What do you think? Drop your thoughts below!
