The March 2020 release of Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness shortly after the first stay-at-home orders went into effect in the United States represented yet another symptom of what was, even by that stage in the pandemic, a very strange year. Across seven episodes, the Netflix docuseries examines the melodramatic characters connected to American big cat breeding, primarily through Joe Exotic, an eccentric Oklahoma zookeeper, and his feud with Carole Baskin, the founder of Big Cat Rescue. As a popular series that appeared to crystallize TV spectatorship under quarantine (Nielsen estimated that 34.3 million people watched the series within the first ten days of its release) the series and its reception circulated wildly across numerous paratexts, social media platforms and think piece criticism, approximating a moment of mass viewing in an increasingly narrowcasted and personalized viewing landscape. As the article’s in this Forum unpack, Tiger King’s extraordinary cultural resonance hinges on its context of reception (the COVID-19 pandemic), its political parallels (representations of rural white masculinity constructed by President Donald Trump), and its excessive aesthetics (marked prominently by camp displays of working-class queerness). My interest here is in the docuseries’ relationship to reality television, and specifically that genre’s capacity to feel “stranger-than-fiction,” though conventions and logics the “docuseries” simultaneously embraces and disavows. This distancing from reality television ultimately masks Tiger King’s dependence upon larger neoliberal economies of celebrity and brand production in order to sustain its dramatic narrative.

中文翻译：

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老虎王，陌生人比小说和电视实境的坚持

老虎王2020年3月发行：谋杀，混乱和疯狂在美国首次实施“在家住宿令”后不久，即使在大流行的那个阶段，这也是一个非常奇怪的年份的另一种症状。整个七集节目中，Netflix的纪录片主要通过怪异的俄克拉荷马州动物园管理员Joe Exotic以及他与Big Cat Rescue创始人Carole Baskin的仇恨，研究了与美国大猫繁殖有关的情节性角色。作为一个受欢迎的电视节目，该电视节目似乎在隔离检疫中体现了电视观众的眼球（尼尔森估计，在发行之日起的十天内，有3430万人观看了该电视节目），该电视节目及其接收情况在众多的文字，社交媒体平台和思想批评家中广为流传，在日益狭窄的个性化观看环境中，可以近似观看大众观看片刻。老虎·金的非凡文化共鸣取决于其接待的背景（COVID-19大流行），其政治上的相似之处（由唐纳德·特朗普总统建造的农村白人男性气质的代表）以及其过分的审美观（在工作营的营地展示中很显眼，班级古怪）。我的兴趣是在纪录片与实境电视之间的关系，特别是那种流派感觉“比小说还奇怪”的能力，尽管“文件”的惯例和逻辑同时受到和反对。这种与真人秀电视的距离最终掩盖了虎王对新自由主义经济体更大的名人和品牌生产的依赖，以维持其戏剧性的叙述。