I have a confession to make. I binge-watched "Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness". I'm a bit of a true crime junkie, but this was something new. Next level. I've never watched anything like it. I heard called a 'car crash', but I described it to a friend in the following way: It's like two cars crashed on railway tracks. Then, a train came along and crashed into the car crash. Shortly thereafter, a plane fell from the sky and crashed onto the car/train crash. It. Was. Amazing. Absolutely un-putdownable.
Don't get me wrong, it's really disturbing. These big cat parks are borderline cults. The men who run them are uniformly abusive - collecting around them young men and women to whom life has dealt a rubbish hand, and keeping them dependent and vulnerable through drug or tiger-cuddle supply. But holy shit, you couldn't make this stuff up. It was all so mixed up that the doco maker himself seems to have caught the crazy by the end of it.
Even just looking at pictures from the show is entertaining. These people simultaneously have too much hair and too few teeth. We have bleached mullets and long, manky ponytails. Someone gets their arm bitten off, another person shoots himself in the head (both only just off-camera).
And the good guy (or, rather, the good gal) in all this turns out to look pretty solid as the murderer of her own husband (another salt-of-the-earth big cat collector who picked her up on the side of the road when she was about 18 and he was close to 200).
I will never watch it again, but I physically could not stop watching it that first time.
I have been reassured, since finishing the series, by reading the similar confessions of journalists, celebrities and actual decent people I know. Apparently no one can resist it.
This isn't a recommendation, really. Or maybe it is? I'd feel guilty telling you to watch it but, at the same time, I feel like if you don't watch it, you're going to be like Captain America in The Avengers and all "I don't get that reference" during every second post-lockdown conversation.
Meme of the day:
