Tiger King’s “mayhem” and “madness” surely parallel and are entangled with the outrageousness of the toxic, topsy-turvy politics of early 21st-century American culture. Both journalistic and critical discourses about the series—including elsewhere in this Forum—have noted, for example, something Trumpian about Joe Exotic: his shamelessness, his self-deluded narcissism, his own 2016 presidential run. The production team arguably dialed up the series’ salaciousness by leaning in on this analogy. Here, however, I want to tease out a less obvious and more speculative layer of Tiger King’s appeal, which I identify as its “accidental allegory,” formed through its historical contingency with the outbreak of a global...
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Jeff Scheible (2020) studied this question.