Dark Side Of The Ring leads off season 3B with an infamous story that had to be told the right way.
Dark Side Of The Ring producers Evan Husney and Jason Eisener spoke with WrestleZone Managing Editor Bill Pritchard ahead of the season 3B premiere on September 16, which starts off with a look back at the infamous “Plane Ride From Hell” in WWE.
Husney and Eisener spoke about why it was finally the right time to tell that story, as well as why it’s going to open some eyes and not just be the party story that some people have hyped it up to be.
“Ever since the beginning of the show, it’s always been a possible topic, only because it’s so infamous. It’s something that I’ve heard for years and years, most of our fans and friends [ask] ‘When are you going to do ‘Plane Ride From Hell?’’ So, it’s always been this constant, sort of white noise in terms of [feedback] and when are we going to do it. For us, we were always very hesitant to do it,” Husney explained, “because it sort of seemed like the only path forward was creating sort of an episode that sort of glorified wild party antics that spiraled out of control in the sky. We didn’t really see the path of how that could really be an episode even though it was in such high demand.
“We didn’t want to just do it just for those reasons. When we started to research the story and talked to people on and off-the-record about the story, that’s when it really started to kind of emerge as, ‘OK, well this is a bigger story.’ We always try to look at with Dark Side of The Ring, ‘Yes, it’s about wrestling and about these wrestlers,’ but it’s always looking at society and culture also through the lens of wrestling and I think this episode is something that is going to surprise a lot of people is that I think that’s what this story is going to do best. It’s going to create a conversation and I think a lot of people are going to be debating it after next week,” Husney said, “but I do think that it is a view into our own society and our own culture kind of through the story of this wacky plane ride that totally got out of control. For us, it was absolutely eye-opening despite even knowing everything that we knew going into it.”
Husney noted the approach they take with each topic of the series and how they’re cautious in telling stories a certain way, explaining that not having the people there or access creates an inauthentic version of the story.
“That was something I was very protective of with the ‘Plane Ride From Hell,’ is if we didn’t get the right people to talk about it, I didn’t want to talk about it because then it just might be that crazy party story,” Husney said.
“Everyone in the episode was on that plane ride,” Eisener added.
Dark Side Of The Ring’s “Plane Ride From Hell” episode premieres on Thursday on VICE TV at 9 pm EST. Check out our full interview at the top of this post, where Husney and Eisener also talk about covering the lives of Chris Kanyon and Luna Vachon, the WWE steroid trial and more.
During Mr. Perfect & Brock Lesnar’s terrifying brawl at 30,000 ft: “Things started to break… the middle of the seat came completely off.”
Season 3 returns tonight with “The Plane Ride from Hell,” tonight at 9pm on @vicetv. pic.twitter.com/u0LDDIPRCl
— Dark Side of the Ring (@DarkSideOfRing) September 16, 2021
