In what will be the first television role of his long career, Nicolas Cage will play Joe Exotic, the subject of Netflix docuseries Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness, in an upcoming television series.
According to THR, this will be an eight-episode scripted series from CBS Television Studios, with American Vandal (R.I.P) showrunner Dan Lagana serving as writer and showrunner.
Despite being a racist, a terrible employer, an animal abuser, and a professional country lip-sync artist, people have been drawn to the messy trashiness of the titular Tiger King: Joe Schreibvogel. His is a personality that’s perfect for the world of 2020, for better or for worse.
Sometimes I’m still genuinely in awe at the way that Tiger King managed to frame Joe Exotic in a way that made people completely ignore the elements of his personality that were truly abusive, from the predatory reasons he hired ex-felons and people struggling with drug addiction, to the fact that he killed many of his own animals or left them in terrible conditions. Wondery’s six-part podcast series about Joe Exotic was very enlightening in terms of further highlighting how bad of a guy he has been. Yet, due to the tragedy of his backstory and the fact that he’s surrounded by many problematic people, he has become a pop culture phenom.
All I want to know is who will play his rival, Carole Baskin, who has her own interesting past, and Jeff Lowe, who is obviously behind a lot of the events that ended up landing Joe in jail. All I hope is that they at least use the actual reporting from the Texas Monthly story by Leif Reigstad as the basis for writing Carole. While the docuseries does attempt to make everyone seem “the same” in terms of villainy, there is no actual proof that Carole had anything to do with her husband’s death, and there is no denying that the threats and constant harassment from Joe Exotic makes him more of a villain than she is.
Most importantly, I hope this new take does highlight that, regardless of how you may feel about the personalities attached to the people, the animals at Joe Exotic’s zoo were not being treated with the care they deserved. In the time since I’ve found out about what cub petting is and all the things that Carole takes issue with, I’d feel hard-pressed to deny that these private zoos are cruel.
We probably won’t be getting any of this for a while, so that means plenty of time for the series to really get the story right and give Nicolas Cage the best chance of getting an Emmy—when we end up doing Emmys again.
(via The Hollywood Reporter, image: Netflix)
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Published: May 4, 2020 04:19 pm