Netflix’s Trainwreck: Mayor of Mayhem is an hour-long documentary on Rob Ford.Netflix/Netflix
We’re coming up on 10 years since Rob Ford’s death – and the memories of his four-year rumble as Toronto’s mayor have happily blurred into the middle distance of the past.
The post-Ford panic that led the city to play possum politically for a decade by electing John Tory over and over seems to have finally lifted.
Torontonians ultimately decided to just move on – name an arena in Etobicoke after Ford last year to placate those who view him as a hero of Hogtown’s hoi polloi, but otherwise pretend like that never happened.
Alas, here comes Trainwreck: Mayor of Mayhem out on Netflix on Tuesday to rudely reopen old wounds and remind us of our world-class shame.
There’s that infamous “crack video” again – there were two, actually – and all those shots of Ford running, running, running, around city hall or smack into a city councillor, while the city itself stood still in what now seem like crucial years wasted.
Why make Canadians cringe anew at Ford struggling with his demons in public and emitting sordid soundbites about “drunken stupors” and how he had “more than enough to eat at home”? Did all that sound and fury signify something?
Trainwreck: Mayor of Mayhem treats Ford largely as the stand-alone story about an addict possessed of a certain chaotic charisma who ended up a leader of the fourth largest city in North American thanks to an electorate momentarily miffed by a garbage strike.
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It has nothing to say about his legacy in burying the myth of Toronto as “New York run by the Swiss” – or the endurance and evolution of the Ford Nation phenomenon under his brother Doug Ford’s mantle.
Indeed, the hour-long doc is designed to only have passing interest in its subject. It’s part of an “anthology documentary series” produced for the streamer by Raw TV, a London-based film and television company, that revisits media circuses from the past quarter century.
A brand that started in 2022 with the three-part Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99 now has a shorter attention span; its first episode this season re-examined the fatal Astroworld Festival crowd crush in Houston in 2021, and the episode to come after its documentary on Ford will be on the so-called “poop cruise” disaster of 2013.
That “remember that terrible thing?” focus, or lack thereof, makes Trainwreck feel like the flipside of those old VH1 I Love… nostalgia series. It’s an approach no doubt in tune with our times – kind of an I Love to Hate… the 2010s.
While Torontonians may be frustrated by this framing, at least Mayor of Mayhem is not one of those docs that tries to come up with a contrarian pseudo-compassionate view on a maligned figure from the past.
Ford is here exactly as you remembered before you blocked it out. “This, folks, reminds me of when Saddam attacked Kuwait,” he said, after city council finally stripped him of his powers. “You guys have just attacked Kuwait.”
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Mayor of Mayhem interviews three groups of people who were immersed in the mayhem: The journalists who tried to expose its true extent; the municipal politicians who eventually stopped it; and the members of Ford’s inner circle who say they tried to temper it.
Ford’s chief of staff Mark Towhey, fired after he kept strongly suggesting his boss go to rehab, comes across a hero of sorts, while the mayor’s receptionist Tom Beyers, whose wife left him during this period of overwork, paints himself as a true believer who felt duped when he learned that a crack video did exist.
As for the journalists, Robyn Doolittle, who moved from the Toronto Star to The Globe and Mail newsroom during that period and literally wrote the book on Ford’s time in office (Crazy Town), is interviewed, of course.
So too is Katie Simpson, then with CP24 and now a Washington correspondent for CBC; she was star of a viral clip, where she turned to the camera and reacted in genuine shock to a sexually explicit soundbite that I heard unbleeped here for the first time and is, indeed, still stunning.
But David Rider, who was then city hall bureau chief of the Toronto Star, makes clear that the Ford phenomenon was not actually good for the press, naming the post-Ford elephant in the room: “Rob Ford demonizing the media years before Donald Trump did the same thing was extremely effective.”
Doolittle recounts death threats she received – and reminds viewers that though she had viewed the crack video first, if it weren’t for the American site Gawker breaking the story, she might not have been able to report on it given Canada’s plaintiff-friendly defamation laws.
What would have happened if Ford were mayor today – with Gawker since bankrupted by a lawsuit backed by an anti-democratic tech billionaire, and the proliferation of deepfakes making the bar for reporting on videos even higher? What would have happened if Ford hadn’t got sick during his re-election campaign for that matter?
I feel that panic again. Thanks a lot, Trainwreck: Mayor of Mayhem, for pulling my head back out of the sand.
