Evan Husney on Jim Cornette & Vince Russo Being Mutually Okay With The Other Appearing on Dark Side of the Ring Episodes, “Begging & Pleading” with VICE To Allow Third Hour For TNA Episode, & Reason For Dutch Mantel’s Abscense From TNA Episode

Fightful held a recent interview with Dark Side of the Ring series co-creator and Executive Producer Evan Husney. One of the topics discussed included Husney’s thoughts about Jim Cornette and Vince Russo being mutually okay with the other appearing on Dark Side of the Ring episodes despite Cornette’s real life rivalry with Russo.

“For whatever reason, they’re mutually cool with each other appearing on these shows, I guess. It’s a tradition, I guess, at this point, this far into series. We’ll feature both of their contrasting viewpoints and creative approaches to wrestling. As legitimate as it is intense that—for lack of a better term—rivalry is, God is it entertaining for TV. So we definitely could have gone further with that in this series. Because the whole saga of Jim getting fired from TNA is a side quest story in and of itself, it could be its own episode of the show.”

Husney also gave his thoughts about him having a shocked reaction when he found out that a third hour was needed to cover the TNA story for the Dark Side of the Ring series and them having to do “begging and pleading” with VICE to allow another hour on the show for the TNA multi-part episode.

“I was shocked that we needed a third hour for this, because the whole project originally, when it was going to be a standalone thing, it was going to be six different parts. It was going to get more into the Scott D’Amore years, it would have gotten into the Billy Corgan years, and it would have been a little more expansive, and not just the Jeff tenure. But when we had to shape it for Dark Side, we focused it around Jeff Jarrett’s story. To our surprise even doing that, we can’t squeeze it in two, we need a third. So that was really like begging and pleading with the network, ‘Give us one more hour and we promise it’ll work.’ Thankfully we did because I think it would have all had diminishing returns if we would have been trying to cram everything in there, so on and so forth to try and do that.”

Husney also gave his thoughts about the reason for Dutch Mantel’s abscense from the TNA episodes was due to a scheduling-related issue.

“Just to mention too, unfortunately, Dutch isn’t in the episode. He’s omnipresent, but it was unfortunate. The timing of it didn’t work out. Dutch is one of my favorite people on planet Earth and he had some health challenges during the time we needed to be filming this. Obviously he was the right hand man to Jeff throughout the whole process. It would have been great to have him in there, but we tried to keep him in there as much as we could.”

Transcript h/t: Fightful.com