Mike Tyson’s life has been told on screen before. James Toback did it in 2008. Spike Lee filmed his one-man show for HBO. Hulu took a crack at it with a scripted series he publicly disowned. Now Netflix has its turn with TYSON, a four-part documentary series that premiered Tuesday and is already splitting critics down the middle.

Directed by Floyd Russ, whose credits include Untold: Malice at the Palace and American Manhunt: The Boston Marathon Bombing, the series runs four hour-long episodes and tracks Tyson from Brownsville through the Cus D’Amato years, the title run that made him the youngest heavyweight champion in history at 20, the prison sentence, the Holyfield fight, the money, the substance abuse, and the 2024 bout with Jake Paul that briefly became the most-streamed sporting event Netflix had ever carried. Bill Simmons and Jim Gray are among the executive producers.

Netflix announced the project in December 2024, a month after Tyson and Paul set streaming records, originally as a three-part series. Tyson set the tone at the time.

“Having an opportunity to share my story through the reflective lens of my growth and maturity in a multi-part documentary on Netflix will be a challenging journey, yet a very welcoming one,” Tyson said. “Most people are too scared to look at their lives objectively, wanting to paint themselves as the hero of their own story. But if we are truly objective, we know we can never be the hero in our own story. We have to be able to face the man in the mirror, taking the good with the bad to give a full account of our contributions in this life. Netflix is the perfect platform to tell my story because of their global reach.”

Whether the finished product faces the man in the mirror is where the reviews diverge. The Hollywood Reporter’s Daniel Fienberg allowed that the series has moments that are “hard to look away from” while arguing that Tyson has been telling his own story for decades and the series adds little that is new. What’s on Netflix went further, calling it a surface-level crash course hindered by Tyson’s lack of introspection and a frustrating handling of his darkest controversies, with the 1992 conviction in particular drawing criticism for how lightly the third episode treats it. Tyson had no producing role in the project.

Boxing fans have been kinder. The archival footage of the 1986 through 1990 run is the draw, and the D’Amato material lands the way it always does. For anyone who came to Tyson through the Paul fight rather than the Spinks fight, it is a reasonable place to start.

Netflix is not done with him either. Mike Tyson: Return of the Mike, his first one-man show since Undisputed Truth in 2013, arrives on the platform November 3. It was directed by Kiki Tyson and filmed in Hollywood, Florida. That lands the same month Boost Mobile’s new ad campaign featuring Tyson rolls out nationally, a week after he joined President Trump on stage in Syracuse, which means the 60-year-old will be about as visible this fall as he has been at any point since his comeback.

All four episodes of TYSON are streaming now. The official trailer is available via Variety.