The Ringmaster’s Final Bell

Vince McMahon has long been pro wrestling's most compelling character, both on screen and off. Now, as the 78-year-old faces what may be his final reckoning, Netflix's documentary series Mr. McMahon offers an at-times intimate portrait of a strange, unknowable man whose mythology has often overshadowed his reality.

For wrestling fans, McMahon's rags-to-riches story is well-trodden ground covered in ur-texts like his eminently quotable Playboy interview from two decades ago. The sexually-abused kid from a North Carolina trailer park who built WWE into a global entertainment juggernaut has been mythologized to the point of cliché. What sets this series apart is the fact that it has captured what will surely be the final public recordings of the man behind the myth, warts and all (McMahon completists will want to watch a lengthy interview done with former NFL star Pat McAfee recorded prior to the mogul’s downfall).

Director Chris Smith, best known for the shambolic and bingeable COVID-era Tiger King docuseries, secured unprecedented access to McMahon. We see the aging mogul squirming in his seat as he grudgingly submits to Smith’s on-camera interview, though his responses often feel carefully rehearsed. "I don't like talking about myself," he says early on, a statement that rings hollow given his decades-long habit of inserting himself into WWE storylines.

What emerges is a portrait far more complex and troubling than the swaggering "Mr. McMahon" character fans know from TV. The documentary doesn't shy away from McMahon's myriad controversies, from steroid scandals to the tragic deaths of wrestlers like Owen Hart and Chris Benoit. But its most revealing moments come when exploring McMahon's childhood trauma ("There’s fighting, there’s infighting, there’s incest," he recalls) and its lasting impact on his psyche — though, alas, there are far too few of these.

McMahon speaks candidly, if somewhat circuitously and clinically, about growing up in an abusive household. His use of the term "incest" is a shockingly blunt admission — put more plainly than in the Playboy interview where he first alluded to it — that the documentary frustratingly fails to get him to explore in depth. Instead, a host of other talking heads ranging from academic Sharon Mazer to ECW impresario Paul Heyman to my Ringer editor David Shoemaker are left to connect the dots between McMahon's traumatic upbringing and his later behavior.

One of the series' most striking moments comes when McMahon describes having "three computers" in his brain — one for business, one for creativity, and one perpetually focused on sex (he tells the interviewer that this computer is thinking about sex right now). It's a weirdly vulnerable admission from someone who has spent decades cultivating a larger-than-life persona. More importantly, it offers insight into the restless, obsessive mind that drove WWE's success and ultimately led to McMahon's downfall.

The documentary's greatest strength lies in capturing McMahon at this twilight moment, when the empire he built is slipping from his grasp. Gone is the swaggering "genetic jackhammer" of WWE lore. In his place is an aging control freak with a plastic surgery-shaped face and puckered lips desperately clinging to relevance. McMahon comes across less as a visionary mogul and more as a small-time promoter who hit the big time through sheer persistence and his trademark "ruthless aggression."

This framing is crucial for understanding both McMahon's rise and his eventual fall. Unlike truly wealthy media tycoons like WCW’s Ted Turner or modern sports franchise owners like AEW funder Shahid Khan, McMahon always operated with the mentality of a scrappy outsider who was one bad fiscal year or two away from bankruptcy. He built WWE not through grand vision, but by outworking and often straight-up bulldozing lazier, more complacent competitors.

The documentary makes clear that for every inspired creative decision, there were just as many ham-fisted attempts to follow pop culture trends. McMahon himself admits that WWE was usually chasing whatever was hot at the moment, rather than setting trends. The infamous "Attitude Era" of the late 90s wasn't birthed from creative genius, but desperation to keep up with edgier WCW storylines and a general coarsening of the culture.

This reactive approach extended to politics as well. If one listens carefully to what is said rather than what the producers are trying to show, the series should put to rest the notion that McMahon's brand of wrestling somehow presaged or enabled the rise of Trump-style populism. If anything, WWE was always a step behind the cultural zeitgeist, awkwardly grafting real-world events onto cartoon wrestling feuds. It was the high-pressure, high-publicity sales methods of already-mainstream "short-fingered vulgarians" like Donald Trump who shaped McMahon’s international expansion of what had once been an incredibly marginal (albeit lucrative, on a smaller scale) regional product.

In that sense, the documentary effectively illuminates how McMahon's particular brand of carny hucksterism dovetailed with the rise of modern marketing and branding. His genius wasn't in creating something new, but in recognizing how to package an old product for changing media landscapes. Pro wrestling had existed for more than a century before McMahon came along, but it often consisted of two tubby, dog-faced old wrestlers in saggy trunks cutting each other open for an audience of intoxicated rednecks. What McMahon figured out was how to polish and sell this curious product to a national audience primed by the excess of the 1980s.

In this, McMahon was very much a man of his time. The same forces of deregulation, media consolidation, and steroid-abetted muscleman mania that allowed him to build a wrestling monopoly were reshaping the film and entertainment industries. McMahon didn't create the game, he just played it better and more ruthlessly than anyone else in his niche.

This context is crucial for understanding both McMahon's ascent and his current predicament. The documentary doesn't draw the connection explicitly, but there are clear parallels between McMahon's story and those of other fallen tycoons like Harvey Weinstein or Les Moonves. Men who built media empires in an era of limited accountability, only to be undone when cultural mores shifted.

The key difference is the scale of McMahon's operation. For all his success, he remained a relatively small player in the broader entertainment landscape. His net worth, while substantial, pales in comparison to genuine media moguls or tech billionaires — after all, in the final analysis, he was a man whose company was acquired by a power player, not a power player who acquires companies. This disparity seems to have fueled a lifelong chip on McMahon's shoulder. The documentary captures his disdain for "the rich" — which he wove into the wealth-flaunting and control-freak nature of his Mr. McMahon character — even as he desperately strove to join and then remain in their ranks.

This inferiority complex manifests in McMahon's management style. Even as WWE grew into a global brand, he continued to run it like a small family business. The documentary details his notorious micromanagement, from personally approving every script to dictating wrestlers' diets and workout regimens (down to squeezing their thighs and telling them to lose a few pounds, if a story told by Olympic weightlifter Ken Patera is to be believed). It's the behavior of someone who never quite believes they've made it, always fearing it could all disappear.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in McMahon's handling of the recent sexual misconduct allegations that led to his ouster from WWE. While the documentary can't delve too deeply into ongoing legal matters — it receives about 40 minutes in the series’ final episode — it doesn't shy away from the sordid details that have come to light. Text messages allegedly showing McMahon arranging threesomes with female employees are displayed on screen. Former WWE performers speak candidly about the company's "toxic" culture around women.

What's striking is how pedestrian these scandals seem compared to the truly depraved behavior of some of McMahon's wealthier peers. There are no private islands or alleged sex trafficking rings here. Instead, we see the sad control fantasies of a poor kid who never outgrew the same small-town mentality that prompted him to marry kindly, competent Linda McMahon because she represented the alluring promise of middle-class stability to him. It's sleazy and exploitative, to be sure, but lacks the organized depravity of a Jeffrey Epstein or the allegations surrounding figures like P. Diddy — instead, McMahon’s "third computer" was directing the sex acts performed on an underling like John “Johnny Ace” Laurinaitis, brother of the late Road Warrior Animal and uncle of ex-NFL star James Laurinaitis.

Throughout it all, McMahon remains stubbornly unrepentant. When pressed on various scandals, he often deflects with a dismissive "Life isn't fair" or insistence that he was simply following cultural trends to earn what singer Woody Guthrie dismissively referred to as that "do re mi." The man who once gleefully played an evil boss on TV seems incapable of seeing himself as the villain in his own up-from-misery life story.

And at least for me — as someone who has been riding this hobby-horse for a very long time — the series puts to rest the notion that WWE under McMahon was some kind of cultural trendsetter. Time and again, we see examples of the company chasing trends rather than setting them. From co-opting the aesthetics of MTV in the 80s to embracing "edgy" content in the 90s, WWE was always more follower than leader.

The much-discussed concept of "kayfabe" — wrestling's commitment to portraying staged events as real — gets ample discussion, especially in the context of the titular Mr. McMahon character that is also undeniably McMahon himself. But facile parallels like those only go so far. McMahon may have blurred the lines between reality and fiction, but he was far from the first or  most consequential figure to do so in American life, as the tragic stories of everyone from Elvis Presley to GG Allin remind us.

The series' structure, while not strictly chronological, allows for these broader themes to emerge organically. We see McMahon's evolution from small-time promoter to media mogul, always with that chip on his shoulder and childhood idol Dr. Jerry Graham’s bad-guy swagger in his walk. The non-linear approach can sometimes feel disjointed, but it allows for interesting juxtapositions between different eras of McMahon's career.

Even after the credits roll, McMahon's story is far from over. Further legal battles loom on the horizon. His legacy in the wrestling world will remain hotly debated. And somewhere in Connecticut, an aging tycoon may still be plotting his next move, unwilling or unable to accept that his time in the spotlight may finally be coming to an end, that he has no moves left to make save the occasional decision to grow a mustache.

To be sure, Mr. McMahon isn't the final word on its subject. But it offers a compelling last public glimpse at the life of one of America's most eccentric entrepreneurs. What we are left with is a story not of visionary genius, but of ruthless aggression fueled by deeply rooted working-class insecurity. And even a figure of Herculean stamina like McMahon can’t outrun such insecurities. As Johnny Paycheck memorably sang, “the truth is the hardest thing I ever faced, because you can't change the truth in the slightest way.” McMahon stands as a reminder that even the most carefully constructed Type A personas must have a main-event encounter with the hard truth of their lives. We don’t get it here in Mr. McMahon, but that reckoning is coming.