A year after its aggressive 15 minutes of fame at the beginning of the pandemic, Netflix docuseries “Tiger King” is making a comeback, although it’s not exactly clear who’s asking for it.
So far, the Peacock show in development will star John Cameron Mitchell as Joe Exotic himself along with Kate McKinnon as Carole Baskin, Exotic’s cat-sanctuary-owning “nemesis” whom Exotic accuses of killing her ex-husband — and plots to kill, himself.
And this is just one show in development to tell the story of Exotic’s wild life as an Oklahoma zoo owner and prolific tiger breeder, who also gets caught up in a number of crimes and conspiracies that landed him in prison in 2018.
The resurgence of Joe Exotic’s story is frustrating and annoying for a number of reasons, not the least of which include that we’ve all moved on from it already, and are exhausted by the entertainment industry’s obsession with trying to profit off the same, tired stories repeatedly.
In fact, much of Exotic’s racist tirades didn’t make it, because according to Chaiklin, “They didn’t have a context in the story.” In the same interview, she says, “Joe is a racist, I would say categorically.” And yet, somehow, this was deemed not relevant to a show about him and his life.
Eric Goode, a co-director of “Tiger King,” told the Hollywood Reporter, “We had empathy for Joe, but Joe did a lot of horrible things.
He also reportedly and unsurprisingly wasn’t a great boss, paying workers less than $150 a week for more than 40 hours of work, according to one former worker who held a Reddit AMA on his experience last year.
Despite all of these inexcusable behaviors, throughout the nation’s brief, collective obsession with “Tiger King,” the Netflix series led many to find Exotic quirky, sympathetic, likable — a meme more so than an attempted killer.
As any reality show watcher can attest to, what we see on screens isn’t always the truth — more often than not, it isn’t.
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