Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Mike’ On Hulu, A Scripted Series About The Life Of Mike Tyson

Mike Tyson is not happy with Mike, the Hulu limited series that’s an examination of his life. He was not involved in any way with the show, and he feels that Hulu has stolen his life story. That’s unfortunate, of course, but not exactly unprecedented. But does this unauthorized version do justice to Tyson’s very complex life?

MIKE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Mike Tyson (Trevante Rhodes) and Evander Holyfield (Johnny Alexander) come out to start the infamous 1997 fight where Tyson bit of a chunk of Holyfield’s ear.

The Gist: That’s not where we’re starting the story, though, at least according to Mike. He’s at the Majestic Theater in Enid, Indiana in 2017, performing a one-man show about his life. As the older, wiser Mike Tyson talks about his life while old pictures of him are displayed in the background, we get the whole picture.

He starts in 1974, in Brownsville, Brooklyn. Eight-year-old Mike (Zaiden James) is a chubby little kid who decided it was always better to run than fight. His mom, Lorna Mae (Olunike Adeliyi), was a victim of domestic violence but fought back as ferociously as some of the hits she took, but was always trying to do right by her three children, even in the face of having to squat in abandoned buildings. She also has to deal with the fact that Mike was deemed “retarded” (using the very wrong vernacular of the time) by his school.

He loved pigeons, and when one came to harm via a local bully, that’s when his fists came out. He became the head of a group of kids who essentially were a petty theft ring; he first got arrested at 10. In juvie, he was a hero, and teenage Mike (B.J. Minor) eventually started boxing under prison trainer Bobby Stewart (Michael Drayer). Stewart knew he had a once-in-a-lifetime talent, so he introduced Mike to a trainer named Cus D’Amato (Harvey Keitel), who had trained two heavyweight champions in the ’50s and ’60s. D’Amato thinks that Tyson could not only be the youngest heavyweight champion of all time, but one of the best ever.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? In tone and, um, use of creative license, Mike very closely resembles Winning Time: The Rise Of The Lakers Dynasty.

Our Take: Like Winning Time, Mike was produced without the cooperation of Tyson or anyone else involved in the story; Tyson has ripped the show, saying the producers have “stolen my life story.” The champ has a right to be pissed; not only is this an unauthorized retelling of Tyson’s life story, it’s also far too fast in pace and lacking of any real examination of the ups and downs of Tyson’s life.

What creator Steven Rogers, showrunner Karen Gist and her writers (Margot Robbie is among the long list of executive producers) have done is take a complex story about a man who has had to contend with his violent tendencies at various stages of his life, into a reel of Mike Tyson’s Greatest Hits.

The show doesn’t necessarily go in chronological order, as it intersperses some his most famous fights into the story to illustrate how the viciousness Tyson learned as a survival method in Brownsville translated to the ring. While that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, here fights like Tyson’s annihilation of Michael Spinks are treated more as illustrations than significant story points.

Rhodes does fine as Tyson, though it seems he leans on Tyson’s un-boxer-like mannerisms a bit too much. The idea is that the series is supposed to show Tyson as something other than what the public story about him has been, which includes his jail sentence on rape charges, his comeback, his downfall and his current position as a pop culture touchstone who still struggles with his mental health. But the speediness with which Gist and company are running through his story gives us an indication that none of that will be examined with enough depth to tell us something new.

Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.

Parting Shot: As Stewart and Mike drive away from a meeting with D’Amato, Mike looks at the roses Cus gave him — Mike had never seen live roses before — and says, “I think I’m going to be somebody.” Then we rapidly pan back from middle-aged Mike standing on that stage in Indiana.

Sleeper Star: B.J. Minor’s version of Tyson seems to hew more closely to the real thing than Rhodes’ at times. though he looks far too old to be playing Mike at 13. We’re also happy to see Harvey Keitel, who should make for an appropriately crusty Cus D’Amato.

Most Pilot-y Line: Don King (Russell Hornsby) introduces himself to Mike at a bar, and Mike proceeds to give him a right hook across the jaw. “Oh, if only,” Mike says to the camera. In other words, that’s what Mike should have done, given how badly King exploited him. But the “If only” might be too subtle for people to notice.

Our Call: SKIP IT. We’d rather see a bioseries about Mike Tyson where Tyson is intimately involved, because we’re pretty sure it will have a lot of subtleties about Tyson’s life that Mike lacks. His life deserves better than a series that treats him like a curiosity more than anything else.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.