Dark Side of the Ring Co-Creator Evan Husney Discusses Crafting TNA Three-Parter

During a recent interview with POST Wrestling’s John Pollock, Dark Side of the Ring co-creator and executive producer Evan Husney discussed crafting the three-part TNA Wrestling storyline for Season 7. Husney reveals that the TNA story was originally pitched as a six-part miniseries similar to the Who Killed WCW? miniseries.

However, VICE TV came back and suggested the team re-envision it for Dark Side of the Ring. It was then reset as a three-parter, primarily focusing on Jeff Jarrett’s journey through the creation, rise, and fall of TNA. Below are some highlights:

Evan Husney on Begging for an Extension to the TNA Story

“Yeah, this is crazy, but we’re doing the TNA saga, trying to fit it in those three hours. I mean, hey, this was supposed to be a 2-hour program, and it existed as such for a very long time until we had a panic that there was no way to fit it all into that. And we had to beg, and we had to plead for an extra hour, which thankfully the network gave to us at the final 11th hour, and scrambled and re-edited everything. But yeah, we’re here, and we’re excited. I’m very stoked for people to check it out. It’s an epic story, man.”

On How the TNA Documentary Was Originally Pitched as Six Parts

“It was a pitch, and we had written it all up. We had researched it. We had a bunch of folks on our team working on it. It was sort of the natural evolution going from when we did Who Killed WCW two years ago, now, whatever that was. And the thought was we could kind of repurpose doing a multi-part spin-off miniseries, you know, about WCW. Maybe then we could examine TNA cuz that story is even more rich. We had thought, you know, like, wow, you know, there’s so much drama and twists and turns and personal tragedy and, like, just emotion and heartbreak and backstabbing in that story.

“And so, yeah, it was going to be six parts because we looked at it and said there’s no way to do this whole saga in, you know, two or three or four. Um, and that was going to be the entire company’s history. It was going to be not just only the Jeff Jarrett, you know, tenure, but it was also going to be the, you know, Eric Bischoff, Hulk Hogan, Dixie Carter, going to get into the Scott D’More era, or even like the Billy Corgan era. Like, it was encompassing the whole thing. But yeah, for whatever reason it it didn’t we couldn’t get it across the green light finish line at the time, and you know, VICE was just really bullish on Dark Side of the Ring.

“I mean that you know these this series has continued to prove itself uh you know um and and and and continues to draw the audience and people are interested in it and it seems to be doing very well still which I’m incredibly grateful and just blown away by every day that we’re still doing this show, but they were like, ‘What if you did this for Dark Side of the Ring? Can’t you just do it for Dark Side of the Ring?’ And I was like, ‘Well, it would be tough, and we would need some serious runtime.’ And the only way I could see doing it was sort of taking what we had planned and researched and trying to truncate it down to just Jeff’s POV and tracking Jeff Jarrett’s kind of rise and fall through the company and zeroing in on that. And that actually proved to be, I don’t know, maybe that’s the most interesting version of it, because it really gives you that, like, emotional entry to the story and someone to, you know, track and follow through the whole journey. And so I think that was like maybe the right move at the end of the day. So I’m happy at where it landed, although it could have been this epic sprawling doc series.”

Dark Side of the Ring Season 7, produced by Evan Husney, kicks off with VICE TV airing Parts One and Two of “Jeff Jarrett’s TNA” on July 7. Part Three will then air on July 14.

If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit POST Wrestling with a h/t to 411mania.com for the transcription.