VICE’s ‘Dark Side’ series of TV shows started in 2019 with ‘Dark Side of the Ring’ and quickly became a hit due to its unflinching willingness to delve into some of the seedier stories in pro wrestling that weren’t being retold by anyone in any official capacity. Several series later and we finally have ‘Dark Side of the Cage,’ which premieres tonight (Wed. Jan. 8th) at 10 p.m. on VICE TV (watch a sneak preview here).
MMAMania.com got to sit down with executive producer Tim Healy to discuss the ten episode first season, which came about after his production company Railsplitter Pictures did a two-parter on the UFC for ‘Dark Side of the Nineties.’ This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Historically, the UFC hasn’t exactly been happy when it comes to exposés that might be, you know, less than glowing. Can you tell me what it was like working in the MMA space and if you had the UFC’s support in this new series.
Dana White, I think he’s everything you want when you have someone at the helm of your company. He’s an amazing businessman and an amazing advocate and very outspoken and protective of his promotion, as he should be. But it’s not ‘Dark Side of the UFC’ that we’re doing with ‘Dark Side of the Cage.
I mean, these are really stories. They’re human stories. They’re stories about these individual fighters. Obviously, there’s gonna be crossover with the UFC because of who the UFC is. But the point of this series isn’t to get into issues like CTE or fighter pay or those overarching issues that the UFC has been criticized for in the past. It’s really to dedicate an hour to tell these individual stories about these individual fighters.
So we did not reach out to the UFC or to Dana White to ask for their participation in the series. What we did was we went directly to the fighters that we’re profiling, and obviously trainers, other fighters, people that had experience with these subject matters. Our goal with the series was not to populate it with journalists and MMA experts to provide the story. What we really wanted to do was to get the right bookings and the right people in the interview chair to tell these stories.
Is there pushback that you guys get when you’re when you’re looking into a story or into a person and you reach out to talk to somebody and and they say, ‘I don’t wanna help put put something up that could be seen as negative?’
‘Dark Side of’ is a tough title when you’re trying to get people to sit and be interviewed. It’s a scary title, but you gotta keep in mind, like, darkness takes different forms. You take an episode like War Machine, and you know exactly what the darkness is gonna be. That’s an absolutely dreadful story that is just violent and tragic and as dark as it can get.
But if you look at a story like Evan Tanner, for example, that’s a guy that was a really smart guy that obviously had issues outside of the cage with substance abuse and with alcohol. So there’s there’s darkness that way. Diego Sanchez, his experience with Joshua Fabia, that’s dark, allowing one individual to kinda get into your life and kinda take control.
We’re fans of the sport. We’re fans of these athletes. The goal is to tell these stories and to be authentic and true, to tell the stories warts at all. These are complicated stories and our goal is to really be accurate and authentic in the way that we tell these stories.
There’s certainly fertile ground for a lot of episodes. How did the your team go about picking the stories that ended up being told?
It’s very easy to make a show just for the fans, that is gonna be really fulfilling for an MMA fan, but maybe not as appealing to someone who’s not an MMA fan. Someone who’s kinda joining the series out of curiosity. So we kinda went for stories that had an appeal both ways.
I mean, if you’re of a certain age, there’s no way that you don’t know who Kimbo Slice is … Obviously Ronda Rousey, what she did, she’s a household name, the crossover with WWE, she shattered the glass ceiling. Everyone knows Ronda. War Machine, I think most people have heard of War Machine. And if they don’t remember, they’re gonna remember pretty quickly because it was kinda everywhere when that happened.
PRIDE FC, we did a two-parter on PRIDE. That could very easily be a story that appeals solely to the core MMA fan. But when you get into the story and the Yakuza and organized crime, there’s elements that I think cross over. So in answering your question, we picked ten stories that hopefully had broad appeal.
Is there already talk of a season two, and is there already a whiteboard somewhere with a list of potential stories for that?
VICE can answer that question about a season 2. I mean, obviously, I was talking to some of the producers earlier today. We had a blast making this series and we’d love to do more. But we haven’t heard anything from VICE yet regarding a second season. And, yes, there’s a notebook filled with with names. To your earlier point, I think one of the the things about this series is, there’s no shortage of potential stories, to do.
The first episode of ‘Dark Side of the Cage,’ ‘Kimbo Slice: Rise of a Backyard Brawler’ airs at 10 p.m. tonight (Wed. Jan. 8th) on VICE TV. January 15th features ‘Diego Sanchez: The Fighter and The Guru,’ and ‘The Final Days of Evan Tanner’ airs on January 22nd.
