After watching an episode, says Peter Fincham, you’ll feel like dousing yourself in hand sanitiser

Cometh the hour, cometh the Netflix phenomenon. Last week President Trump, during one of his rambling, is-this-man-really-the-leader-of-the-free-world press conferences, was asked whether he would consider a presidential pardon for a convicted felon called Joseph Allen Maldonado-Passage. Obligingly, he said he’d look at it. If you haven’t watched Tiger King, you’ll never have heard of Maldonado-Passage; if you have, you’ll know him as Joe Exotic, the gay, peroxide blonde former owner of a ‘zoo’ (when we say zoo, we’re not talking London Zoo – we’ll come to that) who is serving 22 years for a murder-for-hire plot against a rival zoo owner, Carole Baskin, who herself has been accused of feeding her former husband to her pet tigers having put him through a meat-grinder. During the long, shapeless hours of lockdown, it might just be the main thing you’ve been Zooming your friends about.

Tiger King, which is the number one Netflix show in the U.K. (initially Netflix were very coy about releasing their audience figures, now their menu includes a regular ‘top of the pops’ list), takes place in that strange and remote country none of us visit – middle America. It’s as if, while on a flight from New York to Los Angeles, you jumped out of the plane, opened your parachute and landed in a place so bizarre that to call it the third world feels like an insult to developing countries. A couple of years ago we all became obsessed by Making a Murderer, which scratched a similar itch. That series was set in Wisconsin – reminder, don’t book a holiday there – whereas Tiger King introduces us to the delights of Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain and the wavin’ wheat can sure smell sweet. It’s not the Oklahoma of Rogers and Hammerstein’s imagination, though, but a land of gun-toting, trailer park nutcases, some of whom are missing limbs. For added colour our main characters occasionally fly to Las Vegas, where it apparently counts as normal behaviour to pop a live tiger cub into a Louis Vuitton suitcase and smuggle it up to your hotel room so that women will find you irresistible. I wish I’d known that when I was younger.

To be fair to Donald Trump, he hasn’t actually said he’ll pardon Joe Exotic, not least because he hasn’t seen the series. But as the former host of The Apprentice on NBC he understands the power of television. Tiger King is garish, jaw-dropping, ghastly and wildly entertaining. After watching an episode, you feel like dousing yourself with hand sanitiser. And it has in common with Covid-19 that it serves as a stark warning of what happens when we play fast and loose with the animal kingdom. Joe Exotic’s zoo is every bit as alarming as a wet market in Wuhan, not least because of the sheer scariness of its inhabitants, human and otherwise. Unfortunately, the ‘cute’ phase of a tiger cub – that’s when you can make money allowing six year olds to cuddle it – lasts a matter of months and is quickly followed by the ‘absolutely terrifying’ phase, during which it needs to be kept in a cage and fed monstrous amounts of meat, largely taken from supermarkets’ skips. This doesn’t stop the characters in Tiger King petting fully-grown lions and tigers and showing them off to groups of schoolchildren and families who, in many cases, seem to have been matching their meat intake pound for pound.

Of course, television has long known that big cats attract big audiences. Tiger King, like everything else, exists in a tradition. The BBC’s Natural History Unit has been hauling cameras into the vicinity of dangerous animals for decades and made wildlife filming into one of television’s most revered arts. The world of Sir David Attenborough might seem a million miles from Joe Exotic’s but enjoyment of the one arguably stokes the appetite for the other. Louis Theroux has been here too. In 2011 he made Louis Theroux: America’s Dangerous Pets, a characteristically sober-minded documentary for BBC Two. You can now find it on Netflix if seven episodes of Tiger King isn’t enough for you; significantly, it’s been renamed Beware of the Tiger. Theroux spends a lot of time in the company of Joe Exotic who comes across mainly as an amiable eccentric. There’s talk of him being financially stretched – a key part of the Tiger King narrative – but little of the drugs’n’guns stuff that makes the later series so disturbing.

But who’s at fault here? These so-called zoos wouldn’t exist if visitors didn’t keep them in business. And if you’re interested in big cats, and you live in Oklahoma, you’re hardly spoilt for choice. As we’re repeatedly told, lions and tigers don’t belong in America, they belong in distant places like Africa, India and Asia. Since nearly sixty per cent of Americans don’t even own a passport and exotic safari holidays aren’t really an option, a trip to the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park it is. In a post-coronavirus world, where fear of flying takes on a whole new meaning, that number might go up. I’m guessing that it’s higher in Oklahoma anyway. The visitors to these zoos aren’t really any different from hard-pressed parents on wet bank holidays who take their kids to Longleat, or Woburn Safari Park.

Television plays its role and is guilty of catering – pandering? – to our fear and fascination with big cats. Long before the ultra-respectable, conservation-minded approach to filming wildlife that we’re familiar with today, programme-makers were playing to more basic instincts in their audience. The back pages of YouTube are full of the stuff – just search ‘man v tiger’ or similar and you’ll quickly enter a world that David Attenborough would shudder at. Wildlife in its proper habitat – the wild – is time-consuming and extremely expensive to film, and TV will ultimately will take cats where it can find them. In the original series of Planet Earth one of the most celebrated sequences was a distant and extremely rare sighting of a snow leopard, prowling on a distant mountainside, seemingly filmed from miles away. In Tiger King a man opens the back door of a nondescript van and a snow leopard is sitting disconsolately in a cage.

To be honest, though, the runaway success of Tiger King isn’t primarily about the cats. It’s the people who linger in the mind – Joe Exotic himself, who when he grins (often) bears a passing resemblance to Eric Idle; the mumsy but deadly Carole Baskin who may or may not have murdered her husband (my children all said ‘she’s guilty as hell!’); her creepy current partner, who may or may not be looking over his shoulder in case he meets a similar fate; Joe’s drugged-out, toothless husbands (did I mention that he’s a bigamist?); the odious Jeff Lowe who worked out that Las Vegas-plus-tiger-cubs equals action with girls, and who takes over the zoo when Joe runs out of money. At one point, when wrestling with a caged lion which gets a bit too frisky, Jeff tells his wife to get out quickly and an unseen helper calms things down by spraying water in the lion’s face. You almost wish the hose didn’t work.

None of this would be possible without the aspect of Tiger King that, as viewers, we take for granted – access. The cameras seem to follow everything and everybody. I found myself wondering, what’s the deal here? There’s a ‘reality TV producer’ who pops up on camera every now and then – I’m using the term in the loosest sense, he’s not the sort of person you might bump into at the Edinburgh TV Festival – and who seems to have struck a deal with Joe Exotic to film his every waking moment. Fair enough, but why are Joe’s rivals equally happy to share everything with the cameras? Were they persuaded that, whatever differences they might have with each other, or those pesky conservation people who think they’re doing little more than abusing and exploiting innocent animals, or the law enforcement people who might just clamp them all into jail for – well – almost anything, it all pales into insignificance compared to have a starring role in the latest Netflix sensation? I suspect so. Money, guns, sex, and a willingness to risk their lives wrestling deadly predators are one thing; Netflix fame is on another level.

Which brings us back to President Trump’s promise to ‘look at’ Joe Exotic’s conviction. At any one time more than two million people are incarcerated in U.S. prisons, and very few of them command the attention of the U.S. commander-in-chief. But there’s something about Joe – he’s spent his life wanting to become famous, and now he is, and now he can’t enjoy it. Despite the full technicolour ghastliness of everything about the GW Exotic Animal Park, Joe is pure television gold and it’s hard to take against him completely. His threats to have Carol Baskin killed are all a bit theatrical and played up for the cameras. He seems to love his wild cats and he wants to share that love with other people. He’s not as horrible as Jeff Lowe who wrestles the zoo from him like an angry chimp casually ripping your arm off. In recent days Jeff has levelled a few extra accusations at Joe, including bestiality and the possibility that among the bones of euthanised tigers buried in the grounds of the zoo are a few anti-animal abuse protesters too. But then Jeff isn’t serving twenty-two years in a federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas, so he can say these things. (Apologies if you haven’t seen the series and this is a pretty major spoiler).

As we witness Joe’s inevitable downfall two prurient, shiver-down-the-spine sensations mingle – our fascination with dangerous animals, and our fascination with the brutal U.S. prison system. (Documentary makers have been feeding that particular appetite for years – ask Piers Morgan, or indeed Louis Theroux.) It’s a heady mix. When Tiger King came Netflix’s way, with its combination of tigers, prison, murder, bigamy, sex, guns, bestiality and betrayal, the commissioning executives must have literally thought that all their Christmases had come at once. If you haven’t watched it yet, and lockdown is stretching endlessly ahead, and that trip to Woburn Safari Park isn’t an option, and the kids are getting restless – enjoy!

Peter Fincham was MD at Talkback until 2005. He then became Controller of BBC One and from 2008 to 2016 was Director of Television at ITV. In 2017 he co-founded independent production company Expectation.