Dark Side Of The Ring Season 7 To Open With Necro Butcher Vs. Joe

Dark Side of the Ring is returning for a seventh season, and the premiere is set to tackle one of independent wrestling’s most notorious matches: Necro Butcher versus Samoa Joe. Series co-creator Evan Husney spoke about the episode, which is scheduled to air on Tuesday, July 21.

The Necro Butcher-Samoa Joe encounter has long carried a reputation among hardcore wrestling fans for its brutality, and it’s become one of those matches that gets passed around in clip form as a kind of extreme-wrestling legend. By making it the season’s lead-off episode, Dark Side of the Ring is signaling that it plans to dig into the match’s backstory and the toll it reportedly took, continuing the show’s long-running formula of pairing infamous in-ring moments with the human stories behind them.

Husney has been a key voice behind Dark Side of the Ring since its inception, helping shape a series that has built a reputation for revisiting wrestling’s darkest and most controversial chapters — from tragic personal stories to shoot fights and business disputes that rarely got mainstream coverage when they happened. The show has become a go-to watch for wrestling fans looking for context on stories that often lived only in message-board lore and secondhand accounts before the series tackled them on camera.

Details on the rest of season seven’s lineup weren’t discussed in the conversation, but the choice to open with Necro Butcher and Samoa Joe suggests the new season will once again lean into stories with a cult following in hardcore and independent wrestling circles — the kind of match that longtime fans still bring up, but that never got a proper deep dive until now.

Expect more chatter around this episode as its July 21 airdate approaches, especially given how much mythology has built up around the match over the years. For a series built on unpacking wrestling’s uncomfortable truths, this feels like a fitting way to kick off another season.