McGuire’s Mondays: Will you be watching WWE: Unreal?

By Colin McGuire, ProWrestling.net Staffer

There’s this great moment in last week’s Dark Side Of The Ring episode, where the program focuses on an Eddie Gilbert angle that he shot with Jerry Lawler. Gilbert was sort of known for always wanting to try new things and always wanting to protect the business at all costs. As the story went, Gilbert and Lawler agreed to a spot in a parking lot where Gilbert would hit Lawler with his car as he exited a parking lot.

The problem, as Dark Side highlighted, was that Gilbert hit the gas, and, well, actually kind of/sort of hit Jerry Lawler for real. You look at the footage now and it really does look like someone was taken out by a speeding vehicle. Lawler appeared to be really hurt. According to the talking heads on the episode, someone even called the police to report the incident. There was no faking running someone over with a car. As such, Gilbert and Lawler only really had one choice when it came to making the thing look real and that one choice was to push the boundaries of what “vehicular manslaughter” might mean in a court of law.

Gilbert has been on my mind lately. According to Pro Wrestling Lore, he has long been credited with the first shoot interview, dating all the way back to 1994 when he decided to expose parts of the pro wrestling business in a way that nobody had really done prior to him. It was ironic, considering his commitment to the craft, but also foreshadowing in its own way. Just imagine turning on your iPod to hear, “Hey, hey, it’s Conrad Thompson and you’re listening to ‘Hot Stuff With Eddie Gilbert!'” Gilbert probably saw the endgame for the pro wrestling business and he knew that once the floodgates opened for the Information Age to run wild (brother!), a new source of revenue would begin to flow for pro wrestlers far and wide. And if he did, indeed, think that, he wasn’t wrong.

I do wonder what he’d think, however, about WWE: Unreal, WWE and Netflix’s foray into exposing the business more than it’s ever been exposed. You’ve seen the trailer by now, and debates on it have popped up everywhere. Is this taking the death of kayfabe too far? How much will they really show us? Is this all just a work, anyway, and what we see will not be an accurate or full representation of how the behind-the-scenes machinations work at WWE? Will this make for compelling television or will this go the way of the Montez Ford/Bianca Belair reality show that felt far too … um … not reality?

Me? I can’t come to a conclusion on any of it – and yes, that includes if I’ll tune in to watch the thing once it’s released. Does it feel like a step too far? Yes. Ok. Sure. Maybe. Probably. Then again, maybe not. Maybe it’s the next logical step in the evolution of how pro wrestling is presented and digested. Or, perhaps, it’s merely a cheap effort to be taken more seriously as an entertainment product. Maybe nothing is sacred anymore. Maybe nothing has been sacred for quite some time. Maybe I’m overthinking things. Maybe I’m too sensitive. Maybe they’re too eager.

See what I mean? It’s just a thought cloud of contradictions.

In a lot of ways, it’s hypocritical of me to even question its existence in the first place. Digging into the Information Age of pro wrestling had a lot to do with me getting back into pro wrestling. I couldn’t stop consuming the analysis, the rumors, the reports, the opinions, the nuances … pretty much everything except the actual wrestling that was going on inside the ring. And now, I write for two websites, adding to the noise, overthinking things that never needed to be overthought every Monday for the last four-and-a-half years. How could a show like WWE: Unreal exist and not lure me in?

That’s an answer to a question I cannot currently figure out. But I do know it’s a weird thing to untangle. It also brings to the forefront a handful of questions that are applied to things other than just pro wrestling. How much knowledge is too much knowledge? Do we need to always know how the sausage is made? For that matter, why do we always feel like we need to know how the sausage is made these days? Can’t we leave well enough alone and appreciate something for the joy it is supposed to bring us?

Take the (now annual) cuts that WWE likes to make in the afterglow of WrestleMania season. Once word starts trickling out that some wrestlers will not be with WWE anymore, it becomes a weekend talking point for all onlookers. “WWE is filled with greedy assholes who don’t care about their employees,” is one side. “This is a business and not everyone is equipped to be on the grandest stage of them all,” is another. It always seems to be a particularly emotional section of the yearly pro wrestling calendar.

But just think: What if this information wasn’t as readily available as it is these days and in a month or so, we see Dakota Kai pop up on AEW Dynamite? That would be fun. Think of all the times you saw Ray Traylor bounce back and forth between WCW and WWF. Nobody took a weekend mourning for the Big Boss Man, waxing poetic about how the WWF “fumbled” the guy. Instead, he just popped up as a Guardian Angel on WCW Saturday Night a handful of weeks later and all was well with the world.

My point is that I’m beginning to think that too many of us already know too much about this industry. And I’m not so sure that’s a good thing anymore. When I see a magician, I don’t want to see how he cuts the woman’s body in half without killing her. I want to suspend my disbelief and live in that moment, even if I know I can head to YouTube and find instructions on how, in fact, I could cut a lady in half and not kill her. It’s on me to resist that temptation and love something for what it is rather than try to figure out ways to make myself feel as though I am as smart as the people producing said magic trick.

It’s OK to not know everything about everything. But when did that notion begin to feel so dated?

Now, obviously, when it comes to WWE: Unreal, some answers here are simple. I could just … you know … choose to not watch it. We all have the free will to do that. That’s a good thing. But the mere existence of the show begs this question: At what point does it become the entertainer’s responsibility to stand guard for their product’s secret sauce? We can have the “killing the business” conversation all day and night, and answers to questions surrounding these things may depend on which generation from which you came.

But in the here and now, I’m just not so sure this is something WWE absolutely needs to do. It almost feels gratuitous, an idea that’s presented with somewhat of a smirk and serves fewer people than the minds behind the show probably think it serves. “We are WWE. This is how WE do it. THIS is the right way.” That might be a little too cynical of a view to paint the “Unreal” picture, but I also don’t think it’s entirely incorrect.

That, of course, brings me back to Gilbert and Lawler. They decided on an angle so dangerous and so real, why? Because too many people were figuring out how to pull that rabbit out of the proverbial hat. Because of that, Gilbert and Lawler were willing to risk a lot of a lot just to get people to believe what they did was real. And people did believe it was real. Why? Because it was real. Pro wrestling is at its best when it feels real. We all agree on that. The sentiment behind “Unreal” is that pro wrestling is just that – unreal. It’s a machine concocted by writers and producers and rules and show business ethos and all the things that we don’t often need or want to associate with this art form.

Does that mean more wrestlers have to run other wrestlers over with cars to keep this business alive? No. But it does mean that I have no interest in knowing if Lawler and Gilbert shared a Diet Coke later that night, celebrating the success of their story idea. With the upcoming release of this Netflix series, though, WWE is banking on millions of its fans indeed having that interest.

Yeah, but … at what cost?