When WWE arrived on Netflix on January 6, 2025, “sports entertainment” reached its widest reach yet. The deal that brought Monday Night Raw (and, outside the U.S., all WWE productions) to the streaming platform was a handshake between two PR-savvy pop culture giants, and Netflix’s new docuseries, WWE: Unreal, is where their artistry and commerce meet. It’s also where the latter often triumphs, burning the tensions underpinning creative endeavors to a crisp and sweeping them under the rug.
Considered a behind-the-scenes saga and the first glimpse into pro wrestling’s writers’ rooms, Unreal promises exclusive exposure. But it is, to quote the wrestling lingo that has become everyday vocabulary in our hyperconnected, always-on, and fervently fanatical age, a masterpiece. Unreal is pure marketing, a five-episode ploy to attract new viewers to Raw, SmackDown, and the Royal Rumble. Even that promise to put the writers in the spotlight goes virtually unfulfilled.
Stars: CM Punk, Cody Rhodes, Joe Anoa'i
Unreal's first season follows various wrestlers, matches, and developing storylines from WWE's Netflix debut to its annual flagship spring event, WrestleMania—the "Super Bowl of wrestling," as numerous stars and executives remind us. Some faces, like Hollywood mainstays John Cena and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, will be familiar to newcomers. Others, like Australian goth queen Rhea Ripley and electric Samoan sensation Jey Uso, have yet to achieve commercial success, but their broad appeal makes them the perfect subjects for this quick refresher on WWE fundamentals, aiming to teach even non-fans what they already know: that wrestling, while hard-hitting and exciting, is scripted entertainment. “Our business is about telling stories,” says former competitor and current chief content officer Paul “Triple H” Levesque in the first episode, inadvertently hinting at WWE’s fiction: Unreal.
What those unfamiliar may not know, and the series hopes they don’t, is that for a long time, any film or documentary with WWE’s seal of approval has rewritten history. Unreal is no exception: its attempt to unravel the secret is entirely on WWE’s terms, resulting in a sterile depiction of the creative process with few meaningful matches or confrontations, as if every match and story were meant to be perfect from the start. This removes the backstage friction that provides much of the promotion’s appeal, turning Unreal into a passive experience.
The main problem with this approach is one that the most passionate fans will immediately recognize. Since the 1990s, and especially in the modern era of social media, staying on top of wrestling has meant following the ins and outs, breaking news from journalistic sources, rumors, and juicy gossip wherever it may be found. Generally speaking, pro wrestling fans love this fine line between fantasy and reality, and how contractual disputes or real animosity between wrestlers play out on screen in ways the company can't always avoid. With Unreal, WWE attempts to capitalize on this form of interaction, but also exerts control where it otherwise couldn't, reframing every element and possibility as something familiar.
Luckily, that's not always the case; the third episode, titled "Worth the Wait," focuses on the vulnerabilities, creative anxieties, and tensions that shape the stories of WWE's female superstars, such as up-and-coming Chelsea Green and veteran Charlotte Flair. However, Unreal quickly discards each of these threads to deliver a stunningly fluid version of events. For example, Green's intriguing on-screen struggle, as a Canadian, to land a spot on a major Canadian show is completely forgotten the next time WWE returns to Canada. Of the male competitors, only Cena gets the chance to vent emotionally, as he talks about aging and competing in his final year before retirement. In true WWE fashion, very few stories feel complete, and no other company exists in the wrestling landscape, despite several of the featured wrestlers hailing from rival promotions like AEW.
Unreal's structure is simple, alternating between in-ring action, backstage coordination, and post-show interviews. This sometimes results in fascinating moments, such as when directors in the production van are forced to keep pace with plot twists that were kept tightly under wraps until broadcast, resulting in the arduous creative task of live editing on the fly. But this is just one of several components of WWE creation that barely get any screen time in Unreal. Frequently, it does what any wrestler would do when delivering a "promo" on the microphone: use the guise of a narrator to very explicitly sell you something. Give a sourpuss a few uninterrupted minutes on air, and they'll threaten to punch their opponent at a specific time and place, subtly reminding you when to buy the next pay-per-view event. Unreal, for its part, records the chronology of each episode with an on-screen calendar where Monday night is marked as "Raw" and each Friday as "SmackDown," helping us remember when to tune in next.
WWE understandably wants to expand its audience, given its global and instant reach. But that means Unreal spends too much time explaining the rules or the different types of matches. It's boring for anyone even remotely familiar with wrestling—who, incidentally, is precisely the type of person who might be interested in a behind-the-scenes documentary. Non-fans are unlikely to be won over by a process-oriented instructional video; they'll decide whether wrestling is worth their time based on the wrestling itself.
Despite claiming to unveil the artificial reality of professional wrestling, WWE: Unreal simply exposes another hand-painted backdrop, carefully crafted to make a multi-billion-dollar company look like an artistic promised land where nothing goes wrong. While it seeks to introduce newcomers to the fictional nature of "sports entertainment," it offers a robotic version of the creative process, which will surely also scare away regular viewers who search the internet for behind-the-scenes drama.
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