From the producers that unveiled Netflix’s Fyre festival documentary comes a new limited series, Tiger King, this time chronicling the story of Oklahoma animal breeder turned prison inmate Joe Exotic. Netflix dropped the trailer for the upcoming docuseries early Tuesday morning, depicting the “Murder, Mayhem, and Madness” that ensued from Exotic’s (real name Joseph Maldonado-Passage) turn from zookeeper to murder-for-hire plot mastermind.
The series arrives in the shadow of Fyre, a nearly ubiquitous Netflix doc that hit the internet early last year. The streaming service reported over 20 million people watched the film, which detailed the titular festival’s highly entertaining demise under now-incarcerated Billy McFarland.
Tiger King covers a different kingpin this time around, and arrives shortly after Exotic’s sentencing to 22 years in federal prison for 17 federal charges of animal abuse and two counts of murder-for-hire plotting. The trailer shies away from this, instead portraying the Oklahoma lifestyle of Exotic and his peers, complete with taped interviews featuring a fur-pelt background and plenty of loose running tigers. The former zookeeper presided over the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park from 1999 to 2013, raising hundreds of tigers and ending up in nearly a dozen lawsuits along the way.
Netflix’s synopsis describes Exotic as having “passion for big cats and the status and attention their dangerous menageries garner,” before elaborating that “things take a dark turn when Carole Baskin, an animal activist and owner of a big cat sanctuary, threatens to put them out of business, stoking a rivalry that eventually leads to Joe’s arrest for a murder-for-hire plot, and reveals a twisted tale where the only thing more dangerous than a big cat is its owner.”
Tiger King hits Netflix March 20.