There’s an interesting content pipeline happening right now, as viral articles, podcasts and documentaries are turned into various series with movie stars stepping into these fictionalized adaptations of splashy true-life scandals. That trend reaches boiling point this spring, with several of these limited series dropping within a few months of each other. They’re just so good, you’ll want to relive these wild stories all over again.
Remember March 2020? It was a time of hand sanitizer, sourdough starters and never leaving the house. In this dark and uncertain time, one man brought us comfort, and his name was Joe Exotic. The Netflix docuseries “Tiger King” was a beacon of togetherness as we collectively binged the antics of Joe Exotic, Carole Baskin and the rest of the big cats enthusiasts. Just two years later, there’s a miniseries, “Joe vs. Carole,” with John Cameron Mitchell donning Joe’s signature mullet, and Kate McKinnon taking on the role of Carole. The series premieres Thursday on Peacock and is based on the Wondrey podcast, “Over My Dead Body: Joe vs. Carole," hosted by journalist Robert Moor, which came out right before the Netflix series. The podcast dives a bit deeper into the legendary feud between Joe and Carole, so it’s worth checking this one out, at least to see Mitchell channel Exotic.
Also this week, arriving Friday on Hulu, is a story fresh from the headlines: “The Dropout,” a limited series about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, who was convicted of defrauding investors in January 2022. The series is created by Elizabeth Meriwether and stars Amanda Seyfried as Holmes and Naveen Andrews as her former romantic and business partner Sunny Balwani. The show is based on the 2019 podcast of the same name, and there’s plenty of Holmes content to go around, including Alex Gibney’s 2019 documentary “The Inventor: Out For Blood in Silicon Valley" (on HBO Max) and the book, “Bad Blood” by John Carreyrou, the Wall Street Journal reporter who broke the Theranos story and is played in the series by Eben Moss-Bachrach.
