Why Mike Awesome & Scott Hall Aren't In Dark Side Of The Ring Season 4 Revealed

Dark Side of the Ring co-creator Evan Husney has opened up about why episodes focusing on Mike Awesome and Scott Hall didn't make the cut for the show's upcoming fourth season.

Speaking to The Knockturnal, Husney claimed that the subjects leaking resulted in potential collaborators closing their lines of communication, making it difficult to tell the stories in the proper way.

With regards to the potential Awesome episode, Husney said:

"It's tricky because when something leaks, it is both bad and good. Sometimes when you're exploring a story like Mike Awesome, for example, which is a story that I'd love to be able to tell. Mike Awesome was really one of my favourite wrestlers growing up as a kid. Like, seriously, like I was a huge ECW fan growing up. We were exploring that as a potential episode. And I think because of the leak, some people who are close to Mike just kind of got cold feet about what would come out and what would happen in the episode, what we'd cover and unfortunately, the episode kind of fell through for that reason or the access to that story did. And so that was unfortunate, but that's kind of what can happen when something leaks".

A former ECW World Champion, Awesome committed suicide in February of 2007 at the age of 42.

Husney noted that there were similar reasons for the episode on Hall being shelved, saying:

"And I would say the same story for Scott Hall in some respects, too. It was like there were some people we really wanted. It was a little bit different. Like there's some people, we wanted to be able to tell a unique story with Scott Hall because his story has been told so many times and we wanted to find a unique angle. And I think that we did. And then the people that were sort of needed for that episode didn't quite come through. That happens a lot where we try to put these episodes together. We try to get the right voices, and if we don't have them, we just decide not to do them because we would rather not do them than do them with the wrong voices. And so the fact that it gets kind of leaked out there doesn't help because then it creates false hope and you guys get all excited and then we can't deliver. So yeah, but who knows? But as everybody knows in wrestling, never say never".

Dark Side of the Ring's fourth season will premiere on May 30 with an episode exploring the rise and fall of Chris Candido and Tammy 'Sunny' Sytch.