Checked Out The Chris Benoit Episode Of Autopsy

It aired on the Reelz channel on Sunday and we may have a new winner for worst documentary(ish) look at wrestling I’ve seen in a good while.

The idea of the show is kind of a medical investigation deal with a doctor looking over an autopsy report and trying to figure out what happened. In other words, a guy who has nothing to do with wrestling looking at it from an outside perspective with some wrestling people included. That’s where things fall apart.

There were three main wrestling people involved with the show: Les Thatcher (fine), Greg Oliver (wrestling writer who named Bret Hart as the fourteenth best Canadian wrestler of all time) and a guy who wrote a book on Benoit that Lance Storm trashed in an amazing way. That’s it. No other wrestlers, no more wrestling journalists, nothing else.

There were the usual wrestling errors, including the following:

• Referring to Nancy Benoit a “wrestling Diva”

• Saying Benoit fought through injuries to get to the end of the season

• Talking about Benoit getting hurt and coming back from injury to win the World Title “not long after his return to the ring”. It was almost two years later.

• They talked about Benoit getting hurt at King of the Ring, while showing footage of a Raw match. They showed various other pay per views, so why not show the right clip there?

You learn to live with those things, but the problem is the show wasn’t all that good. They talked about Benoit having issues with alcohol, steroids and head injuries and called it a big mixture of factors that caused the incident. What gets annoying is the host saying he discovered things like Benoit having certain drugs in them. By discovered, he means read in the report, which makes me wonder why he needs to be on the show.

Finally though, his big conclusion is that Nancy was the victim of domestic violence. I’m not sure why that’s a conclusion, but that’s what he says as one of his big points. The other thing is that he implies that Benoit snapped because he lost the World Title. While he never flat out says that, he says that Benoit was losing everything he had worked for while showing a picture of Benoit with the title.

Maybe he didn’t mean it this way, but he sounded like he meant Benoit went over the edge because he lost the title. Benoit was probably close to retirement around this time, but that was never mentioned anywhere on here, making it seem like Benoit’s title loss was considered a factor. Sometimes I’ll give people the benefit of the doubt, but not on a show that says a wrestler made it to the end of a season.

All in all, this feels like a very formula based show that was made in about a day. Just wait for Dark Side of the Ring next week and see something with a good bit more effort put into it by more people who know what they’re talking about.

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