Dark Side of the Ring’s Jeff Jarrett Story Leaves Out Kurt Angle

Dark Side of the Ring’s new three-part look at Jeff Jarrett and TNA opened with two strong episodes. It also opened with a problem the show never bothers to hide: this is the Jeff Jarrett story, told almost entirely by Jeff Jarrett and the people closest to him.

That distinction matters. TNA was never a one-man operation, and a documentary that leans so heavily on a single perspective ends up shaping history rather than just reporting it.

The Jeff Jarrett Story WWE Never Told This Way

The first hour covers Jarrett’s wrestling bloodline, his run in the WWF as country-music heel Double J, his friendship with Owen Hart, and the infamous night he held Vince McMahon up for money before dropping the Intercontinental Championship. Jarrett has told that story at length on podcasts before, so none of it is new. What is new is how much the documentary leaves out once Jarrett lands in WCW.

There is barely a mention of Jarrett’s run as WCW World Champion or his history with Vince Russo during that era, a gap that matters later once Russo becomes a central figure in TNA’s creative struggles. Skipping that context makes Russo’s later chaos feel like it comes out of nowhere rather than continuing a pattern that had already played out once before.

Kurt Angle’s Side of the Story Is Missing

The biggest issue with these first two episodes is not what they say. It is who they refuse to ask.

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Kurt Angle is discussed at length, particularly around his drug problems entering TNA and the collapse of his marriage to Karen Angle, who later married Jarrett and appears in the documentary as Karen Jarrett. Karen gets to tell her version of events. Jeff gets to tell his. Kurt Angle, the person the story revolves around, does not get a single word.

Dixie Carter, the former TNA president, at least gets an on-screen disclaimer noting that she declined to be interviewed. Kurt Angle gets no such note. He is simply absent, talked about at length by his ex-wife and her new husband, with no acknowledgment that the other side of that story exists and was never sought out.

Kurt Angle is one of the greatest in-ring performers this business has ever produced, an Olympic gold medalist who turned that legitimacy into a Hall of Fame wrestling career. Telling a story built partly around his personal life without ever putting a microphone in front of him is a real flaw in what is otherwise a well-produced piece of television.

Vince Russo and the Creative Chaos That Sank TNA

Vince Russo sat down for this documentary. Jim Cornette did too, and their long-running disagreement over what a wrestling show should even be gets real airtime.

Cornette’s position is simple: a wrestling show should have wrestling. Russo’s television philosophy, built around gimmicks, swerves, and outlandish angles at the expense of in-ring time, is exactly the approach that left TNA’s most talented in-ring performers stuck for years.

Cornette’s side of that argument holds up. A wrestling show needs wrestling as its foundation before you build angles and promos on top of it, and TNA spent long stretches getting that balance backward. Russo trusting his own instincts on matters far outside his expertise, including some genuinely strange opinions he has shared publicly about combat sports and other topics entirely unrelated to wrestling, only reinforces how much creative authority landed in the wrong hands.

Russo has also weighed in publicly on subjects like baseball roster construction with the same confidence he brings to wrestling booking, and the results are not flattering. Suggesting a contending team should trade its own ace starter for prospects is the kind of take that only makes sense if you have never actually studied the sport you are talking about. That same overconfidence outside his lane is exactly what shows up in his wrestling work, too.

Jeff Jarrett bears real responsibility here, too. He kept bringing Russo back into positions of creative power even after it clearly hurt the company, the same way he pitted his own father against Vince Russo for on-screen conflict, a choice that reportedly strained his real relationship with his father. Trusting Russo with that much creative control was Jarrett’s own mistake, repeated more than once.

Dixie Carter’s role in all of this deserves its own honest look, too, one that this documentary never quite gets to. She came into wrestling with money and no real background in the business, and people who had spent decades in wrestling, Jarrett included by his own account, spent years working with her rather than teaching her. She lost her company, lost a fortune, and became something of a punchline in wrestling circles as a result.

Jarrett says he spent years protecting her from the sharks circling the business. That may even be true. It is also true that once Dixie forced Jarrett out of power, she fired nearly everyone loyal to him almost immediately, which tells you those “protective” relationships ran in more than one direction the entire time.

The TNA Talent Nobody Gave the Ball

Jarrett held the TNA World Championship for years during this period, and the documentary frames it as a trust issue: he could not risk the title on anyone else while running the company. That explanation ignores just how much talent was sitting in the X Division waiting for a real chance.

AJ Styles was the best wrestler in the promotion for years before he ever sniffed the main event picture. Christopher Daniels deserved a run with the top title and never got one. Samoa Joe, the Motor City Machine Guns, Beer Money, Homicide, and Hernandez all built the in-ring identity that made TNA worth watching every week, much like Christian’s TNA run proved he could be a genuine main-event champion after WWE never fully got there with him.

That talent level is exactly why TNA Impact was appointment viewing for a stretch, the way a red-hot weekly show can make an entire roster feel bigger than it is. Kurt Angle, Kevin Nash, Booker T, Scott Steiner, Mick Foley, Ric Flair, Jay Lethal, and Amazing Red all passed through that era. Sting and Hulk Hogan even had their final match against each other in TNA, and it held up.

Mick Foley and Kevin Nash also had a genuinely wild match together during that stretch, the kind of chaotic, hardcore brawl that TNA built its identity on when it wanted to separate itself from WWE’s more polished product. That identity, a rebellious alternative running directly against the PG direction WWE was taking at the time, was the entire pitch of TNA in its best years.

Even the name held up better than it should have. Jarrett and his creative team took heat for calling the promotion “Total Nonstop Action” from the very beginning, a name that plenty of fans mocked as try-hard and meaningless.

Whatever its faults, that name stuck around long enough and was talked about enough to outlast WCW’s entire afterlife in the wrestling conversation. That is its own strange kind of success, even if it was not the one anybody in charge was aiming for.

The Knockouts Pay Gap: The Documentary Glosses Over

Awesome Kong revealed in her interview that a serious pay gap existed between TNA’s male and female talent during the Knockouts era, and the documentary treats it as a passing anecdote rather than the real story it is. Kong was the centerpiece of that division and one of the best performers on the entire roster, full stop, and hearing she was underpaid relative to names like Sting or Scott Steiner is a genuine indictment of how the company valued its own product.

TNA does not get enough credit for what the Knockouts division actually built. While WWE was still running comedy bra-and-panties matches, TNA had Awesome Kong, Gail Kim, ODB, Angelina Love, and Traci Brooks wrestling real, hard-hitting matches and headlining segments of the show. That template is the direct ancestor of the style WWE eventually adopted once NXT started pushing women’s wrestling toward the main roster.

The Knockouts deserved a serious segment on how far ahead of its time that division was. Instead, the documentary spends more time on Kevin Nash’s role in the promotion, and not kindly.

Kevin Nash and the “Friends of Jeff” Get Buried Too

The documentary paints Kevin Nash as little more than a paycheck player during his TNA run, which does not match the record. Nash produced creative segments, helped form the Main Event Mafia faction, and had legitimately good matches during his time there, including a memorable outing against Mick Foley.

Billy Gunn and Road Dogg get similarly shortchanged. Their Voodoo Kin Mafia act was built specifically to needle WWE and get TNA over at WWE’s expense, which is the opposite of phoning it in. Painting all of them as background names, collecting a check, does not match what actually aired.

There were TNA insiders known at the time as the “FOJs,” short for Friends of Jeff, a group that stayed around the company because of their closeness to Jarrett rather than pure merit. The documentary raises that dynamic but never digs into how it shaped who got pushed and who got buried, which is exactly the kind of follow-up question a genuinely balanced account would chase down.

None of this means the two episodes were a waste of time. The Kurt Angle and Jeff Jarrett feud, particularly the Lethal Lockdown cage match with Angle going for a moonsault off the top of the structure, remains one of the most purely entertaining programs in TNA history, built on real animosity that the crowd could feel every week. Jarrett has had a long, strange career full of moments like that, on camera and off.

The show is entertaining. It is well produced. It is also, so far, one man’s version of a story that had a lot more people in the room. Eric Bischoff appears in next week’s finale, and interviews with AJ Styles, Samoa Joe, Christopher Daniels, Rob Van Dam, Booker T, or Jeff Hardy would have gone a long way toward making this feel like the real Dark Side of TNA instead of the Dark Side of Jeff Jarrett.

TNA never lacked for talent. It lacked anyone in charge who could consistently get out of that talent’s way, and this documentary, so far, is more interested in explaining why Jeff Jarrett tried than in asking why nobody around him, including Jarrett himself, could ever finish the job. Hulk Hogan’s own arrival in TNA years later would become its own cautionary tale, one that the finale is reportedly set to dig into.