Why America is Obsessed with Netflix’s ‘Tiger King’
If you haven’t seen ‘Tiger King’ on Netflix, I’d tell you you’re missing out. Depending who you ask, this is debatable. The tagline for the show is “the wildest story you’ll never believe”, and for most of those who’ve seen it, this couldn’t be more truthful.
Many people are obsessed with the show, specifically since we’re all watching more TV right now. During the week of March 16, paid subscriptions for all streaming TV and video jumped an overall 32%.
‘Tiger King’ is a 7-episode docu-series highlighting the story of a gun-toting, 200+ tiger-owning, multiple-husband-having man named Joe Exotic, and his ongoing feud with Carol Baskin, a fellow owner of another big cat sanctuary. The feud ends up leading to a murder-for-hire scheme, and that’s only part of the story!
Personally, I think there are a few reasons we’re obsessed with (ahem, enjoying) ‘Tiger King’ right now:
We like to watch train wrecks.
I mean, as long as they’re happening to someone else, or if the train wreck is someone else. They’re hard to look away from, which obviously make for good television, and it’s easy to get caught up in a web of complexity that seems much different from our lives. (I’m assuming most of you reading don’t have an alleged monthly $70,000 food bill for your tigers, right?)
We love it because our lives are weird right now.
Probably weirder than they’ve been in a long time. We love watching something that seems weirder beyond our comprehension right now. It’s been hard for many of us to accept the fact that life is difficult, and because most of us are grieving right now (it doesn’t look like the regular type), most of our emotions feel strange or displaced. Sometimes watching something that we perceive to be just as weird as we’re feeling right now can feel like a comfort.
We’re all way more complicated than we realize (and I think we secretly love this).
If you’ve seen the show, especially if you’ve only seen the first episode or two, you can easily get caught up thinking you know how the rest of the story will play out. However, as you get to know the close supporting characters in Joe and Carol’s lives, and the tangled web of lives, you start to realize things are far more complicated.
As Brene Brown says in Braving the Wilderness, “It’s really hard to hate someone up close.” You tend to get this feeling the more episodes of ‘Tiger King’ you watch. There’s so much to the stories we don’t know (that you can easily Google), but sometimes that’s helpful to our own psyches.
So here we are, obviously knowing that life is more complex than what’s we see on TV, feeling lots of things about our weird lives right now, and knowing it’s nice to get caught up in the stories (or train wrecks) we watch on TV. Sometimes we do what we need to do to get by.
Now excuse me while I go look up the cost of a tiger in California.
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