Six seasons deep, the team behind Vice TV’s documentary series Dark Side of the Ring continues to run into unique and new challenges as they produce the show.
In some episodes, they’re trying to uncover stories that the average fan might have never heard of. On others, they’re looking to add new details and information to some of the industry’s most famous (or infamous) stories.
On Tuesday night, the new season premiered with an episode on Mick Foley’s 1998 Hell In A Cell match against The Undertaker. The critically acclaimed bout is best known for a death-defying stunt from Foley – then working under the persona Mankind – when he flew off the top of the 16-foot steel cage and through a table at ringside.
For Dark Side of the Ring co-creator Evan Husney, the episode provided two new challenges.
First, he wondered: How can they tell the story of the famous Foley performance in a way nobody has seen before?
And maybe an even larger challenge: “Can we make one hour of the show about one match?”
Husney recently told POST Wrestling that the team tried to really tap into Foley’s psyche surrounding not just the match but wrestling in general to look at the event in a way that many documentaries and retrospectives hadn’t done before.
“Has it been really told where one is getting psychologically deep into what makes Mick tick, in terms of why are we doing this and how is it important to him and how has it defined him?” Husney said.
And when it comes to making it an hour of solid TV, Husney stated that it all came down to creating fresh, new visuals. The team re-created “little corner pieces” of the cage and used a Phantom camera to capture slow-motion shots of Mick “floating in the air, rotating as he’s about to hit that table.”
Playing off the idea that time froze in that moment, the crew worked to try and really grind everything to a standstill during a moment that is still talked about more than 25 years later.
“Normally, we would probably just live in the archive of the match because what’s better than the actual match itself?” he said. “But for this, we knew we kind of had to bolster it with something more. And so we wanted to embrace the challenge of trying to re-create these moments.”
Husney’s team worked on the little details for the episode, trying to point out intricacies of the moment.
“We’re trying to emphasize the things you might not see on camera as well,” he said. “For example, when they’re walking across the cage in our show, you see the zipties bursting in macro-focus. Which is a crazy thing, that that’s how they adhered the cage, the top of it.”
Replays of “Mick Foley: Hell in a Cell” are available on the Vice TV site. Episodes premiering in the coming weeks include subjects like Superstar Billy Graham, Muhammad Hassan, Big Van Vader, and Ludvig Borga.
