Evan Husney talks about his favorite episode episodes from season six of VICE's Dark Side of the Ring.
Ahead of the sixth season of the very popular Dark Side of the Ring series on VICE, producer Evan Husney chatted with Sean Ross Sapp about the new season and the series' success. When asked what his favorite episode of the new season is, Husney spotlighted the episode about Mick Foley and the 1998 Hell in a Cell match with Undertaker at WWE King of the Ring.
"Honestly, they're not all finished yet. This is kind of how it goes. Half of them are done. Like the first five are done. The back five are still in various stages of completion, which is always very anxiety-inducing because you have no more time, you're out of time, you have to deliver them as they air, and it's really stressful," he admits. "So it wouldn't be fair to all of them because I haven't seen them in their final state, but the ones that, if I can just pick a few because it's tough—the Hell in the Cell one, I personally feel like ranks up there. If I had to make like a top 10 list of the episodes we've ever done.
"I would put that in the top 10 we've ever done because I feel like just from the interview subject strength, how intense it is, and shout out to our editor Peter, who just killed it on that episode. I think it's amazing. So that one I'm really excited for."
Evan Husney also expressed his excitement about the episode featuring Tony "Ludvig Borga" Halme. Halme was a top heel in WWE for a very brief time and went on to become a far-right politician in his native Finland. Husney says the episode will dive into Borga's politics and the Nazi-related tattoo he had that WWE only discovered after they hired him and would lead to him having a brief stint in the company.
"A kind of a deep-cut wild episode, the Ludvig Borga episode is pretty crazy," he said. "That episode is interesting because we have something, we have a saying around here, which we call ‘the Hasbro principle,’ which is if they got a Hasbro figure, might as well look at it for a possible episode of the show. It’s always like, ‘Before you rule it out, if they got a Hasbro, it's worth looking into.’ Ludvig does have a Hasbro and he's the part of the last series. I think he's actually the most valuable based on rarity and scarcity. He is the most valuable Hasbro, I think, outside of the prototypes and the misprints and whatnot. That story, it's not so much about his career in WWF for that year he was there, if that, in the mid-90s. It's more so about his political career after WWF in his homeland of Finland, where he turned into basically a Nazi and led this far-right party, and it's very scary and very eye-opening. I think there's a lot of just new, it's going to be tons of new information for people who may have heard that name, but I guarantee you that you're going to learn a lot from that.
"He had an SS tattoo on his calf that they discovered after he was brought in, and they basically covered it up with taller boots, and then it was basically looking for any reason that they could to get rid of him by that point because he also was just very unsavory," he adds. "But I think it was he was also on top of that, on top of how insane that is of having that tattoo. I think he was also just not a very liked individual in the locker room, very unsavory. So I think when they got rid of him, I think he got injured, and then that was the end of that. But he got deported from this country for drugs and buying machine guns. Then, he went back to Finland and tried to stop at nothing to become a local celebrity by being on their version of Gladiators. He made his own weird electro-rock album. Then he ran for office, and he won, and the craziest part about it is he had all the crazy, divisive, racist rhetoric that helped him get elected. But he is one of the most voted-for politicians ever in Finland, which is crazy. So he became this firebrand, and he did this. But then, of course, there was a lot of drugs, and there was a lot of booze, and there was a lot of hubris. That obviously led to his downfall. But it's just a fascinating, wild, and crazy story that's well beyond the scope of just wrestling."
