Tyson: “I’m a product, remember?”

The crime (with a content warning)
Sexual assault; simple assault; intimate-partner violence. 

The story
I already talked a bit about Netflix docuseries Tyson on Extra Hot Great a couple weeks back; the docuseries comes from Floyd Russ, the director of two iterations of American Manhunt and the inaugural episode of Untold, “Malice at the Palace,” probably still the series best.

Here’s (most of) what I said on EHG, with a link or two added:

It’s an interesting time to be thinking about and reviewing documentaries in the true-crime genre; Tyson may not think of itself as in THAT genre, versus in the sports-biography genre, but thanks to You Can See Everything, a conversation I’ve been having with myself as a reviewer, and with other true-crime consumers, for many years is a much more central part of the discourse – what exactly is being quote “documented”; does the MANNER and STRUCTURE of the documentation constitute part of the story, and should the viewer expect it to; things of that meta nature.

I think that’s a good conversation or dialogue to have about any cultural…artifact, but especially true crime and the parallels to the stories that a trial or an investigative file try to build. I think a secondary conversation when it comes to THIS genre is that of building story AROUND the criminals, whatever the nature of their crimes, particularly when, yes, you want to center victims and their experiences, but if the alleged criminal in question is already famous for something else, how do you manage that charisma? 

It’s something I call The OJ Dilemma; OJ Simpson isn’t the only instance of this, but you do sometimes have crime stories where the glare of the alleged perpetrator’s superstardom makes it verrrry difficult to see the case itself, and the OJ case epitomizes that.

That’s an issue for Tyson too, so far – I haven’t finished the four-parter as of this writing, so I can’t render a full judgment, but while it IS very watchable, and Tyson IS obviously very charismatic and has been a magnet of attention and notoriety for four decades, his cultural ROLE has also evolved over those decades, sometimes via no influence of Tyson’s own, and there’s a third dialogue to be had, I think, about WHEN a true-crime property is made, and specific to Tyson, how it talks about a Black fighter who came out of Brownsville, Brooklyn and the New York State juvenile-detention system in the eighties, and was reborn in the twenty-first century as an almost-cuddly and avuncular figure.

I’ve since finished the series, and it IS watchable, but I said on EHG that I didn’t know what to do in terms of recommending it, and I still don’t – because what’s being documented here is highly dependent on the titular subject’s cooperation. Tyson does have that, and I think Tyson is reasonably forthright in talking-heads, but certain “delicate” questions of responsibility perhaps do not get the pushback they otherwise might. 

Certain aspects of Tyson’s upbringing also remain somewhat elliptical, like his mother’s actual biography, and what HE thinks now of his mother doing sex work in the same bed. The role of drug use or dependency in his life, especially in more notorious episodes, is mentioned, but then shrugged off all “you know how THAT goes”; Tyson’s adult children (usually named some variation on “Mike,” btw) sighing that he used to disappear for months at a time IS disarmingly forthright, but at the same time, it’s the kind of disarming forthrightness that’s often intended to deflect follow-up questions.

A few other thought-provoking aspects of Tyson:

How much victim-blaming dominated the discourse around the Desiree Washington assault. Almost every contemporary-news snippet Tyson employs is a variation on “why’d she go to Tyson’s room if she wasn’t DTF?”, and even he basically says it. That’s depressing enough, but I don’t know how well 2026 coverage would do with that, honestly. The idea that nothing “implies” consent except consent, and/or that it can be withdrawn at any time, is still not something we’re doing great with these days.

What a different world we’d live in if Donald J. Trump just did interviews for documentaries, or hosted shows about New York City in the 1980s. I KNOW I said the same thing about Rudy Giuliani in a review of some Mob doc – not this one, but one like it, where his ubiquity and expertise did so much to counteract his by-now caved-in reputation as a racist badge-humper and MAGA stooge. Why didn’t ID just give Giuliani a show back in the nineties and save us all a lot of grief? He’s still basically hateful and I don’t need him to get wins, but he does have informational utility in the genre.

Trump: same thing, and we’ve come full circle to The OJ Dilemma, in a way, because he is a dementedly styled clown and I can’t WAIT never to think about him again, BUT he has always understood how to get and keep attention, and he understands OTHER people who understand that. I watched the old man – chyroned as the president – rasping about loyalty and learning from failed deals, seeming eminently pleased to gas on about The Old Days and that somebody asked his opinion, and I had to wonder, how different might the country look if he’d lost ten years ago and waddled off to own a TV network, or do…this, sit for interviews about headline stories of the past? Yeah, 97 percent of it is self-aggrandizing nonsense you can’t use, but you cut around it and it keeps him off the streets.

Hindsight is 20-20, of course, but the other side of those sliding doors got me thinking.

When we get a Buster Douglas/Lennox Lewis discussion podcast, I’m so in. Lewis’s mellifluous authority means he could read the phone book and I’d be in, but both guys have a wryness to their analyses in Tyson that made me want to hear more from each – and/or both. (I remember liking the 30 For 30 on the Douglas-Tyson fight, but not much else about it.)