Few wrestling tales have been covered, dissected, discussed, celebrated and argued about more than Mick Foley's Mankind) being thrown off the Hell in a Cell structure at King of the Ring 1998. And while I always thought I had the full story, that changed upon watching the Dark Side of the Ring Season 6 premiere and its breakdown of how the match and other difficult moments in the WWE Hall of Famer’s career impacted his family.
Ahead of the Vice TV show’s return to the 2025 TV schedule, I sat down with Dark Side of the Ring creator Evan Husney and asked him why he wanted to tackle something that had been covered so much. Essentially, it came down to looking at the match outside of the lens as a wrestling story and more as an exploration of the human element of Mick Foley’s story during the match and beyond.
Ahead of the Vice TV show’s return to the 2025 TV schedule, I sat down with Dark Side of the Ring creator Evan Husney and asked him why he wanted to tackle something that had been covered so much. Essentially, it came down to looking at the match outside of the lens as a wrestling story and more as an exploration of the human element of Mick Foley’s story during the match and beyond.
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00:00It only was through like, you know, other docs like Beyond the Mat, for example, where we saw a glimpse of sort of maybe the the consequences of that, which is his family, you know, who kind of is along for the ride and they don't always know the things that he's doing and putting himself in harm's way in order to put food on the table.
00:19And those are kind of very underappreciated elements that us as fans don't really take into consideration because we get so swept up into the drama of it all that it is like, you know, to hear Noelle in our episode, you know, Mick's daughter talk about how she's blocked out all of her dad's wrestling matches.
00:35I mean, that's pretty traumatic, you know, for somebody into having to go along with this.
00:40And so our whole approach was, yes, this match has been really told so much, but we wanted to look at it from a more fresh point of view in terms of trying to get deep into, you know, Mick's psychology, what makes him tick, why he wanted to go in through achieve this.
00:58Look at like his own personal sort of complicated history with how he looks at it, how he sort of views it and like the legacy of it, but also the consequences of how that impacted his family.