“Dark Side of the Ring” returns this week with the first two parts of a three-episode arc covering the history of TNA Impact Wrestling.
Series creator Evan Husney has said that he pitched a six-episode mini-series on TNA to the folks at Vice TV, to try to do the story of the company, which debuted in 2002, justice, but couldn’t get Vice to pull the trigger.
Note to the suits at Vice: we would have tuned in to all six episodes.
Alas, we get three, and we have to like it.
The “Dark Side” look at TNA includes interviews with everybody who was anybody in the company over its history, save one rather key figure – Dixie Carter, the marketing assistant-turned-TNA president, who served in the latter role from 2003-2016, overseeing both the company’s initial growth and then putting the likes of 1990s also-rans Vince Russo and Eric Bischoff in control of the company’s creative, moves that TNA has never been able to recover from.
Because Carter isn’t on camera to tell her side of the story, the story ends up getting told for her – and it’s not going to be kind.
Schedule
- July 7: “Jeff Jarrett’s TNA,” Episodes 1 & 2, 9 p.m. ET and 10 p.m. ET
- July 14: “Jeff Jarrett’s TNA,” Episode 3, 10 p.m. ET
- July 21: Samoa Joe vs. Necro Butcher, 10 p.m. ET
- July 28: The Big Bossman, 10 p.m. ET
- Aug. 4: “Renegade” Rick Wilson, 10 p.m. ET
- Aug. 11: Paul Orndorff, 10 p.m. ET
- Aug. 18: Missy Hyatt, 10 p.m. ET
- Aug. 25: Zach Gowen, 10 p.m. ET
Show notes
The in-depth look at the 2005 indy match between Samoa Joe and Necro Butcher might catch your attention right away.
All I know from the story is what I heard Evan Husney tell Jim Cornette on a recent Cornette podcast about the match, which took place in 2005 at the old ECW Arena in Philadelphia, and was booked as a sort of indy dream match, between the hard-hitting worked shootfighter Samoa Joe and the death match hero Necro Butcher.
The match, as the story goes, got a wee bit out of control – fans still seem to think that the match went from being a work to being a shoot, based on the stiff way that Joe worked the match, with his punches, and a memorable powerslam spot on the concrete floor.
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The episode featuring “Renegade” Rick Wilson is a nod to the origins of “Dark Side,” which began with retrospectives on Randy Savage, Bruiser Brody, Gino Hernandez and the Von Erich family – if you see the pattern, wrestlers who flew too close to the sun and died young, and tragically.
Rick Wilson, who as “The Renegade” was WCW’s Temu version of The Ultimate Warrior, had a brief run as the WCW TV champ before being buried underneath, then released – and falling into a deep depression that ended with Wilson dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head on Feb. 23, 1999, at the age of 33.
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The Big Bossman episode falls along the same lines, except that The Bossman, Ray Traylor, who made his debut in 1985 as Cornette’s storyline bodyguard, Big Bubba Rogers, and later signing with WWF and almost immediately being booked into a main-event program with Hulk Hogan in 1988, didn’t die by suicide.
Traylor had a mix of success and runs marred by bad booking, and wrestled up to the end – his last match, a loss to “Hacksaw” Jim Duggan in the finals of a tournament to crown the new champ of the International Wrestling Association of Japan, came on Aug. 31, 2004, three weeks before his death, by heart attack, on Sept. 22, 2004, at the age of 41.
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Chris Graham
