Captive audiences: Quarantining with Tiger King

After a deadly virus leapt (possibly) from bats or pangolins to humans in late 2019, much of the quarantined Western world found itself enraptured by the spectacle of another boundary breach: humans handling wild cats on Netflix’s documentary series Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness. In its thematization of animal and human captivity in the institutions of the zoo and the prison, Tiger King spoke in unexpected ways to viewers trapped at home and raised parallel questions about the ethics of caging animals and, perhaps, humans. This chapter brings together scholarship from film and media studies, animal studies, and queer theory to draw out the queer ecological dimensions of Tiger King, situating it as an unorthodox phenomenon in contemporary environmental broadcasting and what Nicole has described elsewhere as a work of “low environmental culture.” We begin by examining representations of the program’s protagonists, Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin, in the emerging world of “digital drag,” before turning to the portrayal of Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park in the series, which we read in the context of the cultural meanings of zoos, tigers and “liveness.” In doing so, we highlight the extent to which the program prompted critical reflection on the normative human family amid the retrenchment of conservative domestic norms during the COVID-19 pandemic.