‘Muscles & Mayhem: An Unauthorized Story of American Gladiators’ Review: Netflix Docuseries Is a Dishy Dose of Nostalgia

Daniel Fienberg
·6 min read

We may live in a post-truth world, but most viewers still settle in to watch documentaries with the assumption that what we’re going to be treated to is at least some version of “truth.” Surely, we think, “truth” is what most documentary filmmakers aspire to.

If that sounds familiar, you probably read too many of my reviews. It was the start of my take on The American Gladiators Documentary, Ben Berman’s four-hour 30 for 30 treatment of the syndicated spandex-and-steroids phenomenon that was American Gladiators. Less than a month after that project, which took an intentionally truth-evasive look at authorship controversies surrounding American Gladiators, along comes Tony Vainuku and Jared Hess’ new Netflix’s five-parter, Muscles & Mayhem: An Unauthorized Story of American Gladiators, which has a different approach to “truth.”

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“The time of the American Gladiators. It was the ’90s,” Dan “Nitro” Clark says in the introduction to the series. [American Gladiators premiered in 1989.]

Nitro continues, “Clinton was in the White House.” [Bill Clinton formally became president in January 1993.]

“It was definitely the era of superheroes,” adds Steve “Tower” Henneberry as the directors cut to a clip from He-Man. [We can debate whether or not He-Man is a superhero, but the footage is from an animated series that premiered in 1983.]

“Athletes were becoming mega box office superstars,” Tower adds, as the directors cut to footage of… O.J. Simpson. [Huh?]

It’s one thing to approach your subject matter as mythology or a tall tale. It’s another thing to, within the first 10 minutes of your documentary, simultaneously attempt to provide context and obliterate all context, but that’s how Muscles & Mayhem operates. It’s five episodes that feel truth-adjacent more than true.

If the 30 for 30 film was about a quest for some elusive truth, however far afield it takes you, the Netflix documentary is about embracing the tall tale even if it feels reductive or simplistic. The ESPN doc is more narratively adventurous, often at the expense of the fun and sizzle American Gladiators fans might want (or the hard-nosed reporting I was hoping for), while the Netflix doc is about celebrating the fun and sizzle, often at the expense of anything below the surface (or the hard-nosed reporting I was hoping for).

In short, the ESPN documentary is better, but the Netflix documentary is more likely to satisfy audiences who want a dishy dose of nostalgia.

Vainuku and Hess’ series — none of the five episodes is longer than 47 minutes — puts the spotlight on the gladiators themselves and unlike the ESPN doc, which relied mostly on Mike “Gemini” Horton and Deron “Malibu” McBee, it has the gladiators you probably want to hear from. Muscles & Mayhem has Nitro and Tower (I do not remember Tower at all) and Jim “Laser” Starr. It has Raye “Zap” Hollitt and Sha-Ri “Blaze” Pendleton and Lori “Ice” Fetrick and Debbie “Storm” Clark and Erika “Diamond” Andersch. And yes, Gemini is present in this one as well.

From there, the title tells you exactly what to expect.

The documentary leads with the mayhem: Nearly a full episode is dedicated to the semi-disastrous and definitely primitive original pilot, with lots of stories of shooting at an equestrian center with challenges bearing little resemblance to the games fans would come to know and love. The footage from that pilot, eventually cut down to a sizzle reel by Samuel Goldwyn TV to sell the series, is plentiful. Anywhere there are gaps, the directors employ vintage ’80s-style animation, the only aesthetic or narrative flourish in the series.

Eventually, the series makes its way to the muscles, with at least one nearly full episode spent talking about steroids. We get a mixture of glibly excited stories told by Nitro; evasive and semantic distinctions — Faye is determined to make it clear she used “growth hormone,” but never steroids — from other gladiators; and lots of even more glib evasions from the handful of available executives, who strike an implausible balance between “Won’t somebody please think of the children!” outrage and “I’m shocked, shocked to find that performance-enhancing drug use was going on in here!” disingenuousness.

As for the blending of muscles and mayhem, everything really comes together in the fourth episode, built around the apparently notorious American Gladiators national tour after the show’s third season. The various gladiators sit and giggle about all of the drug use and hooking up that happened on the bus. The episode is, if you actually pay attention, much more packed with people saying how outrageous things were than by people giving detailed remembrances of that outrageousness, but there’s enough of each that nobody will care.

The gladiators have all spent decades now on the self-promotion/nostalgia circuit; there isn’t a single answer across five episodes that doesn’t come across as thoroughly workshopped, and the directors don’t push at all to shake Nitro or Ice or Laser out of their comfort zones. As was the case with the ESPN doc, there’s indeed a sense of insufficient follow-up questions being asked to break through the semi-scripted memories. This is especially the case when it comes to people like Goldwyn executive Dick Askin, who somehow keeps skating on rather serious issues like how corporate entities were exploiting the underpaid, overworked gladiators and turning a blind eye to drug use except when it threatened to impact the bottom line.

Even dot-connecting that, to me, feels pretty obvious is ignored. I’m especially ticked off that several gladiators lament their failure to find solidarity in contract renegotiations and nobody points out the irony that multiple original stars got their starts as strike-breaking NFL replacement players. Come on.

The ESPN documentary was occasionally fairly bleak in covering the various descents into drug addiction and even death. The Netflix documentary is much cheerier — all the better to placate the fans who only crave “Wasn’t that awesome?” hagiography and turning the gladiators into overstuffed human beanie babies.

Those viewers won’t care one way or the other that Muscles & Mayhem has a bizarre approach to the show’s general creative process. Co-creator Johnny Ferraro appears only in fleeting archival footage, and his contributions are mostly mocked. Credited co-creator Dann Carr, whose legacy Berman spent nearly four ESPN hours trying to reclaim, isn’t even mentioned. Instead, Muscles & Mayhem gives most of the credit for the series’ success to executive producer Eytan Keller, sleazy porn-loving director Bob Levy and the wise shepherding of studio executives.

Vainuku and Hess are much less skeptical of their subjects, but the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. It’s still funny how little overlap there is between the two documentaries, with fewer than a half-dozen stories repeated. Neither American Gladiators documentary is close to definitive, but what a dream for the franchise’s fans to get this sort of Rashomon-esque look back. Anybody else merely needs to wait a few months. Your flavor of ’80s and ’90s nostalgia is bound to get competing docuseries treatment eventually.

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