Saying you weren’t riveted by the Netflix series Tiger King these days is like saying you don’t like the Bill of Rights.
You feel like someone from whom other people would maintain social distance even if they didn’t have to.
I can’t help it. I punched up Tiger King. I bailed. I’m not going back.
Netflix won’t miss me. At last report, Tiger King had reached at least 64 million viewers and counting.
That number includes many people I personally know to be smart, perceptive, and discriminating.
Why did they watch? Couldn’t stop, they said. Sucked ‘em right in. Way too fascinating to stop. I believe them. I think I even see why.
I just couldn’t do it, even though I love tigers. Is there anything more perfect anywhere in nature than the face of a tiger?
Still couldn’t watch. Too many flashbacks.
Joe Exotic, the Tiger King of the show’s title, wants people to watch him, to look at him, to pay attention to him. That’s really all he wants.
The tigers, the lions, his zoo, his traveling show, those are all props. If he could attract the same attention by opening a can of green beans, that’s what he’d be doing.
Which brings me to my flashback. Remember the golden age of combat television? Remember how hosts like Jerry Springer would book guests for the express purpose of having them bait, insult, and attack each other?
It was sloppy and embarrassing, and the audiences, in-studio and at home, loved it until they realized they were watching the same thing every show.
My takeaway from those shows was the contestants. I envisioned them filming the show, dusting themselves off, and exchanging high-fives. They would get the airdate of the show, invite all their friends for a party and exchange more high-fives as they watched the show disintegrate into a two-bit brawl.
For the rest of their lives, as I envisioned it, they would pull out that tape at every family gathering and on every social occasion, and they would be the envy of the room – because they had been on television. Didn’t matter what they did. They were on television, and everyone was watching.
Meanwhile, down the street, some anonymous scientist could have been curing childhood leukemia. Didn’t matter. That scientist wasn’t on TV.
It took about 30 seconds for Joe Exotic to become a Jerry Springer guest, at which point I stopped caring.
That’s a shame in a way because Tiger King explores a serious issue: private ownership of large wild animals. What’s the morality of caging lions and tigers and passing their cubs around as props for tourist selfies? At the same time, with wildlife habitat rapidly shrinking around the globe, can private ownership and the zoo system help protect species? Is there a balance? Who might oversee it?
Tiger King could have been done as a scholarly documentary, the kind of Nat Geo or PBS series that could have explored the whole complex issue.
And those 64 million viewers would have shrunk to maybe, if everything broke right, 6.4 million.
No, Tiger King made the wise commercial choice to focus on a narcissist who would say and do anything. Tiger King also had the year’s luckiest timing, because it landed at just the moment when Americans had been herded indoors and were looking for something to liven up another day of looking out the windows.
The producers did what they had to do. The viewers did what they had to do. The system worked.
But for me, if I wanted to watch someone who was on TV simply to bask in his own image and swoon at the sound of his voice, regardless of whether he had anything of value to offer, let’s just say there are other places we can get that on television these days.