Considering that we're living in a fast paced, chaotic world again —where phrases like "during lockdown" and "when we were in quarantine" are whispered, unmasked over post vax cocktails — it can be hard to remember those bleak months of 2020 during which life as we knew it came to a halt. Perhaps it's a willful cultural amnesia to move on from the trauma of it all (though we are still most certainly in a pandemic). Maybe we don't want to remember being "bored in the house." But Netflix bopped in to remind us today that during that time they created a mass cultural hysteria with their show Tiger King — which the country essentially watched together in one giant, government sanctioned viewing party — and as if our file of "things we don't need" could get any bigger, they announced they're releasing a second season.
Tiger King dramatized the world of Florida big cat breeders in a soap-opera fashion, and launched wild characters like Joe Exotic (Joseph Maldonado-Passage) and Carole Baskin to fame. The show also managed to catch the beginning of Maldonado-Passage's arrest for conspiring to murder Baskin, among other salacious and bizarre plot points. And while the show's absurdist quality made it compulsively watchable, especially when we were trying to numb our way through such a horrific moment in history, it highlighted a growing moral ambiguity in the true crime meets reality TV genre.
