Overview
True-crime stories have saturated all forms of media of late. If you're not listening to podcasts on the topic, you're watching Zac Efron play Ted Bundy, exploring the intersection of fact and fiction in Mindhunter or poring over a TV series about Serial's Adnan Syed. But despite the seemingly never-ending list of new additions to the genre, we're betting you haven't yet witnessed anything quite like Joe Exotic's story, which is the subject of Netflix's new Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness docuseries.
Clearly, Joe Exotic isn't the name that the show's mullet-wearing focal point was born with. But given Joe's love of big cats and line of work — and, based on the series' just-dropped trailer, his over-sized personality — he obviously decided that the moniker fit. Between 1999–2016, he created and ran The Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park in Oklahoma, which was home to hundreds of tigers, lions and other large felines.
Joe also took his tiger show on the road and, because he just adored tigers so much, he literally sang about them as well. His first country music album was called I Saw a Tiger, because of course it was. He found time to run for Governor of the state and, in 2016, President of the US. He was fond of guns and just as fond of marrying more than one person at once. Oh, and the zookeeper tried to hire a hitman to get one of his rivals — Big Cat Rescue animal sanctuary's CEO Carole Baskin — killed.
Lions, tigers, eccentricity, polygamy and murder-for-hire, oh my! That's the tale that Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness — and yes, it's so strange that it can only be true. It's no wonder that Netflix has turned it into a series, which drops on Friday, March 20. And it's just as unsurprising that the folks behind last year's must-see doco Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened are behind it.
Check out the trailer below:
Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness hits Netflix on Friday, March 20.
Images: Netflix