Mr. McMahon Architects Reflect On Making Of 'Strangest Documentary' They've Ever Done

Taking a cue from Oprah, Vince McMahon tried to purchase the documentary made about him in order to bury it. It didn't work. Now the six-part series "Mr. McMahon" is available on Netflix for the world to see — warts and all. On "The Bill Simmons Podcast," Simmons, an executive producer on the series, explained why "Mr. McMahon" was a project unlike any other he'd done before.

"It was certainly the strangest documentary process I've ever been involved with," Simmons said. "We were trying to do a balanced portrait, as balanced as we could, of somebody who for 50 years had this outsized impact on not only completely changing professional wrestling, but culture, television, cable, the pay-per-view model, the streaming model. There was just nobody like him, no promoter like him. So the big thing was, like, how do we capture that impact? And then the second thing was, who is this guy? What's real and not real?" David Shoemaker, who appears as an interview subject in the series, theorized that McMahon was so heavily entrenched in the character he played on TV that not even he possessed a full grasp on who he really was — something McMahon alludes to himself in the documentary.

"I'm not sure that [Vince] knew what story he wanted to tell. I don't know if he even knows who is he enough to tell that story," Shoemaker said. "He's just the most bizarre subject to try to do this kind of project for. ... His timeline is inextricable from WWE. There's very little personal life there for us to go into." Perhaps predictably, McMahon is protesting the documentary's slant, calling it a "deceptive narrative" in a statement prior to its release. This prompted Janel Grant's attorney to issue a statement of her own addressing McMahon's remarks.

If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit "The Bill Simmons Podcast" with a h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription.