A couple of weeks ago, I powered through Mr McMahon, the six-part Netflix profile of the former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO. If you watch it you’ll soon see why, whether you’re a wrestling fan or not: Mr McMahon has that same propulsive quality as The Last Dance, managing to illuminate a world that plenty will only have the most cursory knowledge of. Vince McMahon (pictured above with Hulk Hogan) built an empire on salacious spectacle, with a fictionalised “bad guy” version of his own mogul persona (Mr McMahon) at the centre of it all. The series attempts to find the line between McMahon and his in-ring alter ego, featuring extensive interviews with the man himself and just about anybody of note who has ever worked alongside or against him, from Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson to Bret “The Hitman” Hart.
Still, as engrossing as Mr McMahon is, it isn’t perfect. In fact, it has a near-disastrous flaw (spoilers of a sort ahead): right at the series’ climactic point, midway through its sixth and final episode, the show addresses the allegations of sexual assault and trafficking against McMahon that came to light during the series’ making and that have prompted a federal investigation into his conduct. (McMahon denies the allegations.) By this point, McMahon has long since vacated the interviewee’s chair: he withdrew from the documentary after the first tranche of misconduct allegations emerged in 2022. Absent too are the many wrestlers who had previously lauded their former boss (the WWE had ceased being a co-producer somewhere along the way). So the series muddles on, with a handful of non-wrestler talking heads and an awful lot of news report snippets doing the heavy lifting. It’s an unsatisfying end to say the least.
Coincidentally, right as Mr McMahon was landing on Netflix, news broke that Oprah Winfreyhad paid a substantial fee to permanently block the release of an Apple TV+ documentary about her life and career, something which McMahon had allegedly tried to do with his own documentary profile. Officially, Winfrey (below) had determined that “it wasn’t the right time to do a documentary” (a stance that she might have been better off expressing before agreeing to do a documentary); unofficially, according to the New York Post, it was because she was unhappy with the cut by director Kevin Macdonald, and Macdonald – one of the most celebrated documentary film-makers of the last quarter century – wasn’t up for changing it. So instead Winfrey bought the rights back from Apple – took her ball home, in effect – and a much-anticipated film will now presumably never see the light of day.
The same fate looks set to befall a nine-part documentary on the life and career of Prince. The series, bankrolled by Netflix and helmed by Ezra Edelman, director of the brilliant OJ: Made in America, is in release limbo after the Purple One’s estate changed hands and its new trustees objected to its depiction of him. (This thorough report by the New York Times explains the conflict in full, and also gives a tantalising sense of the series’ quality.) Despite Edelman and Netflix having final cut on the film, the estate have reportedly been able to prevent its release due to a clause stipulating that the series could be no longer than six hours in length. Edelman’s cut is nine hours (a similar length to the OJ doc), and, like Macdonald, you imagine he’s probably loth to alter it. So another potential documentary classic is left to gather dust on a shelf.
Such is the sad state of the documentary profile in 2024, where subjects and the people who represent them have more say over the finished product than ever before. It’s a subject we’ve discussed before in this newsletter, in reference to the strange documercial that is Welcome to Wrexham, but since then the trend has seemed only to have accelerated, with more and more celebs playing the role of executive producers in films or series where they’re supposed to be the subject. The makers of profile documentaries in 2024 face quite the dilemma: do you waive control in return for extensive access to your subject, their friends and family and a vast library of material; or do you retain control, and find yourself having to glimpse your subject through the equivalent of a tabloid long lens, as Mr McMahon is forced to do in its final half hour. It’s only natural that plenty would choose the former.
And in fairness, if you were a celeb with the clout to wrest back control of your own narrative – well, why wouldn’t you? These documentaries after all, serve as a defining telling of your story, and – in the age of streaming – are likely to be around long after you’ve gone. For Winfrey – or David Beckham, or Martha Stewart and Pharrell Williams, this is simply a case of managing the multimillion or -billion dollar brand that is their lives. And in fairness it’s not like these docs are entirely without merit. They’re often made by talented filmmakers who know how to get a lot out of their subjects, even with constraints placed on their direction. In some cases their subjects will also be canny enough to realise that showing a sliver of their real selves might actually be beneficial.
Yet even with the best of these hagiocumentaries it’s hard to escape the nagging sense that there are truths being withheld from us. That can be the case with any documentary, of course – but here it’s being effectively confirmed in the closing credits. Still, that’s a better situation, I suppose than the finish product being derailed, a la Mr McMahon. And it’s certainly better than the thing never seeing the light of day at all.
