Things You Should Watch If You Like Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem And Madness

Every year or so, another Netflix true crime miniseries becomes a national obsession that turns millions of viewers into amateur criminologists. The taut drama of mystery, conspiracy, and murder slowly and deliberately unravels over seven or eight episodes, making for some extremely bingeable television. And following in the tradition of Making a Murderer and The Staircase, there's Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness, the somehow true story of Joe Exotic — country musician, politician, polygamist, indefatigable self-promoter, and operator of a hands-on big cat zoo in Oklahoma. 

Exotic was involved with many other tiger park players, and they all shared an enemy in animal rights activist Carole Baskin. But everything went haywire when Exotic, a court affirmed, tried to have Baskin killed. It's a story so intoxicating and weird that viewers are left wanting more once the final episode ends. So until the next big Netflix hit comes along, here are some other documentaries (and documentary-like productions) that should fill the Tiger King-sized hole in your heart.

Real life is consistently bizarre. It's a comedy of errors that most of us stumble through, resulting in all manner of physical and emotional pratfalls. Documentaries — films that capture reality — are more often than not super serious, which means the ones that let this real-life comedy happen feel so refreshing and truthful. For example, there's Netflix's surprisingly wacky Tiger King, and there's also Bryan Carberry and Clay Tweel's rollicking and absurd Finders Keepers. 

This hidden gem of a documentary begins in 2004, when, after suffering injuries in a small plane crash, John Wood has his leg amputated below the knee. Wood then asks the hospital where the surgery was performed for his bones back (hey, those are his bones) so he can use them as part of a memorial to his father, the deceased pilot of the plane that crashed. However, the hospital gives Wood his whole leg back — meat still there — which he decides to try and mummify by leaving inside of a barbecue in a storage shed. 

But then Wood has an addiction relapse, forgets to pay his shed rent, and the contents get auctioned off, including the leg-filled barbecue. New owner Shannon Whisnant discovers the leg and wants to use it as some kind of roadside attraction. And thus, there are now two grown men fighting over an amputated leg, not in your typical courtroom but on a courtroom TV show. If this were a narrative film, it would feel contrived, but here, it's delightfully absurd.

Documentaries and reality series are a wonderful way to see life from somebody else's point of view, particularly if they're from a section of society shrouded in mystery ... or one that most people don't even know exists. As Tiger King explores the little-known world of roadside animal parks and wildlife sanctuaries, Well Groomed looks at another creature-based subculture: competitive dog groomers. But dog grooming isn't just cutting a poodle's hair in the traditional way. It's using the animal as an artistic canvas, and participants dye hair and/or cut it in strange ways to fit a theme. 

For example, take the dog with the green fur on its back arranged to look like scales (a la a Jurassic Park dinosaur) or the one with so much color and attention applied to it that it looks like the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland. The action all culminates in the subjects (some of them champions and giants in their field) leaving their homes and dog salons in all the corners of America for a national contest in Pennsylvania. This documentary from HBO Films is such a low-key funny and insightful look into both small-town life and a low-stakes, hyper-competitive hobby that, at times, it feels like a real-life version of Christopher Guest's mockumentaries Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show.

Decades before Tiger King reminded Americans that tigers and other big cats are gigantic animals that should be both respected and feared, there was a 1981 movie called Roar that did the very same thing. Or at least it tried to. Tippi Hedren, the actress best known for her role in the horror classic The Birds, dedicated her life, Carole Baskin-style, to saving big cats. She opened the Shambala Preserve north of Los Angeles, and that's where the bulk of production for Roar took place, a narrative film made with her husband, Noel Marshall, which went so far over budget and blew past schedule deadlines so often that Hollywood was left alienated and never released the movie in the U.S. 

However, the behind-the-scenes story of Roar was far more interesting than the movie itself, if not legendary, and the harrowing truths were finally all laid bare in documentary form in 2015's made-for-Animal Planet Roar: The Most Dangerous Film Ever Made. In the doc, we discover that Hedren was bitten on the head by a lion, and after being thrown by an elephant, endured bone fractures and skin graft surgeries. Marshall was bitten so many times that he got gangrene. Cinematographer Jan de Bont was even scalped by a lion. All in all, around 70 people were directly and painfully injured while working with the animals that Joe Exotic and friends purport to love. In short, the '81 movie is one of the most dangerous films ever made, and the documentary is a fascinating look at all the big cat insanity.

While the stories of Joe Exotic, Carole Baskin, and Doc Antle all end differently, they all more or less start out the same. All three managed a big cat preserve or zoo because they all feel a profound connection to tigers and such. One might call them obsessive, and obsession is a fascinating trait to observe in others, particularly when common sense suggests the individual has gone past the point of no return in pursuit of their pet cause. That's why Sean Donnelly's 2008 documentary I Think We're Alone Now is so compelling. It unflinchingly explores extreme, if not toxic, fandom that borders on mental illness.

Remember 1980s pop star Tiffany, famous for "I Think We're Alone Now" and touring malls? By the 2000s, she was playing "nostalgia" concerts, starring in B-movies, and trying to keep her distance from guys like Jeff Deane Turner. He's the world's biggest Tiffany fan, proven by his extensive collection of Tiffany memorabilia, which includes a restraining order, the many letters he's written to her (returned unopened), and news clippings about that time he got arrested when he tried to gift the singer a sword. Interspersed with Turner's slightly wacky story is that of another Tiffany obsessive, Kelly McCormick, who used Tiffany's music to cope with changing gender identity and a horrendous childhood.

Netflix has deftly figured out the perfect formula for multi-part crime documentaries. Tropes like overhead shots, menacing music, and long "talking head" shots combine to build suspense and a well-polished quality. All of that and more are perfectly parodied in the Netflix original series American Vandal. It looks and feels like a true crime multi-parter, except that it's a mockumentary. 

So what's the requisite crime of the century explored in exquisite detail in season one of the show? Well, it's who crudely spray-painted male genitalia on the teachers' cars in the parking lot of a California high school. The most likely — but possibly railroaded — culprit is class clown and unoriginal prankster Dylan Maxwell (Jimmy Tatro). AV club documentarians Peter Maldonado and Sam Ecklund (Tyler Alvarez and Griffin Gluck) set out to make a film to find the truth, however elusive, which also means plenty of dead serious explorations (and forensic re-creations) of bits of evidence. 

And in a nod to how Netflix could be considered exploitative in turning crime into entertainment, American Vandal got a second season, in which Peter and Sam inexplicably travel to Seattle to help solve an even grosser and more hilarious mystery about who laced a high school lunchroom's lemonade supply with powerful laxatives.