Hacker Cinema
Tiger King
2020 · TV series · documentary · 2 seasons
Created by Eric Goode, Rebecca Chaiklin
A zoo owner spirals out of control amid a cast of eccentric characters in this true murder-for-hire story from the underworld of big cat breeding.
3 positive7 negative14 neutralfrom 24 commenters
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24 comments on Hacker News
I think Netflix's incentives, especially now that they have an ad tier, have changed.
With a subscription service 10 years ago, you just need to have enough must-see content:
- Original scripted TV series that become mainstream known and/or seen as prestige TV, like "The Crown," "Mindhunter," "Bridgerton," "Stranger Things" etc.
- "Crown Jewel" reruns with huge fanbases such as The Office, Friends, Seinfeld, Modern Family, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Arrested Development, etc.
- Unscripted TV series that become buzzy - like Love Is Blind, Tiger King, etc.
Having those categories all well-stocked ensures that only a fool would cancel their Netflix subscription as they'll be out of the loop when the new season of a 'zeitgeisty' show drops. You don't really need all your viewers to watch more hours to get more money every year, you can grow revenue with a combo of new viewers and price increases as long as users just watch regularly.
I think present-day Netflix sees incentives:
- to get as many people on the ad tier as possible so they can scale revenue with watch time
- to increase watch time which is a solved problem via psychological manipulation if you have good ML like they do
- more watch time without spending more money points pretty obviously to lowering cost per show as much as you can, which manifests as worse quality, more reality, more imported dubbed shows, etc. and drastically curtailing giving huge checks to the Matthew Weiners, David Benioffs, and Vince Gilligans of the world to bet on a massive superhit.
So they will want to focus heavily on the unscripted category plus whatever they can slap together cheaply, then autoplay and optimize their way to growth.
American Movie (1999) has lived rent-free in my head since Y2K.
The filmmaker Chris Smith has gone on to make Fyre, Tiger King, Bad Vegan and others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Smith_(filmmaker)
Hm I also cancelled about a month ago, after more than 10 years. I noticed there was good quality content on YouTube I was watching more.
I think the tipping point was that I got sucked into quite a few low quality crime documentaries, which were not doing anything for me, and probably hurting.
The Madoff one was actually good, but there were 10 others that in retrospect I regret watching.
Even Tiger King was like that. It's more colorful, but ultimately a waste of time ... If you look into it, basically all the characters there are very bad people (i.e. they abuse both animals and people).
IMO it's kinda poisonous to watch too much of that stuff. To take it lightly and brush off other people's misfortunes as entertainment.
I found it pretty compelling, despite knowing the outcome for years. Then again, I never watched tiger king, so this style of documentary was fresher to me.
> As for a 'fracturing',everyone's talking about stranger things and obi-wan. Kate Bush is top of the charts because of stranger things. Remember everyone talking about Tiger King or GoT? Certainly doesn't feel fractured to me.
It's also losing sight of books. There's so, so many books out there, it could be called even more fractured than modern TV/streaming, and yet big hits happened. When I was in school in the late 90s/early 2000s, everyone at least knew of (if not was a fan of) Animorphs, Goosebumps, Redwall, Harry Potter (before the movies), etc.
I think you underestimate the scale of how “short tailed” everything used to be.
Yes yes tiger king, stranger things, etc. these things are popular.
In 1983 over 50% of the entire United States watched the last episode of MASH live as it aired on NBC. And people talked about it for 10+ years.
He actually explicitly mentions Amazon and Netflix as counter examples of what you've said.
Amazon - he says a lot of pundits claim their retail arm is not and will never be profitable, they have been saved by aws
Netflix - has cut the number of movies on offer dramatically, cutting out the long tail, and adopted a strategy of chasing blockbuster TV shows
It's worth reading the whole article, it is pretty good.
As for a 'fracturing',everyone's talking about stranger things and obi-wan. Kate Bush is top of the charts because of stranger things. Remember everyone talking about Tiger King or GoT? Certainly doesn't feel fractured to me.
Netflix suggestions are not good. It takes a long time to find something decent to watch.
I have enjoyed Narcos, Tiger King, Stranger Things, Queen's Gambit and others.
But there are so many bad shows, that are formulaic, unoriginal and overall, lame.
Then, I have nothing against noble causes such as social justice and such. But compare a good movie, such as Men of honor, or the Green Book, with the unoriginal content on Netflix. It is just not watchable.
They have "Grace and Frankie", which is their longest running show at 7 seasons.
Netflix IMO tries to make shows that are very zeitgeist-y, instead of evergreen, like Friends and The Office. I think that will come back to bite them in the future because I don't see anybody wanting to license one-offs like Tiger King or Squid Game for syndication down the line.
Meanwhile, decades-old shows like Law and Order, Frasier and Two and a Half Men are still making bank because they have tons of episodes and are generalist enough to be popular across pretty much any cable network globally.
The issue is their content is actually a very poor point in differentiation. I watch a larger amount of TV than I'd care to admit, and honestly Netflix is awful for content.
- Disney has Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, and a long tail of childhood classic films. - HBO has Warner Brothers, DC, Cartoon Network (including a nostalgia back catalog), the best TV shows made in the 00s, and a long tail of adult films. - Netflix's largest successes in the last two years are Tiger King, Squid Game, The Witcher, and a long tail of shows cancelled after Season 1 and short-run miniseries.
At this point, Netflix is a last-resort source of entertainment for me, even after (ad-riddled) YouTube. I mostly only use it to watch their weird reality shows (Blown Away, Sugar Rush) and check out shows friends recommend. I suspect even Paramount+ has a larger selection of TV shows I'd like to watch compared to Netflix.
I remember one time being asked at work if I watched some Netflix show du jour ( I believe it was Tiger King at the time) and I replied with: "I don't watch a lot of TV in general. Yes, I have Netflix but don't watch it very often."
Then I went to say that in my spare time I like to listen to music and reading. You'd think I'd have said that I'm into being a serial killer. Just weird puzzled and uncomfortable looks.
It then struck me that many people, if not most, cannot comprehend spending their leisure time in any way other than passively watching movies, TV or videos on their smartphone or playing video games.
And believe me, I'm not saying it just to be pretentious, but a lot of the time, reading is way more exciting than whatever's happening on the small screen. There's nothing wrong with TVs and movies but they're certainly not the only way to spend your leisure time.
I don't know what you are talking about. I can tell you the rough plot of Stranger Things, Squid Game, and Tiger King despite never having seen a single episode of those series.
Shows are still part of popular culture, it's just streaming instead of timed TV.
What's your frame of reference for this statement?
Mostly I've seen a very mixed bag of opinions, reactions and measures over the past year and a half.
I think people are pushed to extremes because there's a heady mixture of:
1. an invisible, unthinking enemy breaking through borders affecting everyone and causing an inflection in basic social etiquette that demands action in very grey and alien moral zones most people have no experience in
2. the internet increasingly dominating the human experience while still being a relatively new, mindfuck global network that (a) undermines basic instincts honed for thousands of years, (b) increases fringe and extreme communities by enabling distributed social networking, and (c) enables surveillance and individual targeting on a scale most preceding dystopian literature couldn't imagine
3. unsolveable, self-perpetuating issues such as racism (as a proxy for culture wars and systemic oppression), conspiracy theories / misinformation (as a means of fracturing and neutering political movements that empowers users and proponents like a heroin-dealer empowers the neighborhood) and wealth inequality (the 'meritocratic' cloak over the otherwise naked aristocracy of capitalist societies) all dominate discourse and news cycles with the apocalyptic 'slow' train of climate change coming into view that we can't avoid because the sheer scale escapes our petty existential crises and sadistic impulses that have driven history and gotten us here (wherever the hell 'here' is)
4. the release of the tiger king documentary
Here my first thought was that this is some crazy Tiger King scenario.
Some people see "animal adoption" and think about how you can sponsor a critter at your local zoo.
Some people see "animal adoption" and see hillbilly tailer park side show TV shows.
I guess it's all in your life experiences.
I’ve heard another similar documentary is “Fourteen's Good, Eighteen's Better”.
It’s well known that events get coverage almost inversely proportional to how frequently they occur. But the day to day stories in these films tell us so much more about our culture than e.g. Tiger King. And in 28 years our children will find them just as exotic.
Matt Levine expressed this perfectly back in April
The weird thing about the coronavirus crisis is that it simultaneously (1) caused a stock market crash and (2) eliminated most forms of fun. If you like eating at restaurants or bowling or going to movies or going out dancing, now you can’t. If you like watching sports, there are no sports. If you like casinos, they are closed. You’re pretty much stuck inside with your phone. You can trade stocks for free on your phone. That might be fun? It isn’t that fun, compared to either (1) what you’d normally do for fun or (2) trading stocks not in the middle of a recessionary crisis, but those are not the available competition. The available competition is “Animal Crossing” and “Tiger King.” Is trading stocks on your phone more fun than playing “Animal Crossing” or watching “Tiger King”? [..] I gather that for some people the answer is yes.
If you believe the boredom thesis of the current retail rally, that is good news, because that thesis is basically countercyclical: The worse the economy is, the more bored investors will be. If stocks sell off because the coronavirus crisis is longer and worse than expected, there will be even fewer entertainment options and more people will turn, in desperation, to buying stocks on their phones. If someone finds a magic cure for the virus tomorrow, stocks will rally and all the new retail investors will happily sell into the rally at the top and go back to their other, more entertaining, entertainments.
A few? Off the top of my head:
- The Queen's Gambit
- Narcos
- House of Cards
- Russian Doll
- Ozark
- Stranger Things
- Tiger King
- Dear White People
- The Witcher
- The Umbrella Academy
- The Crown
- Space Force
And that's just TV shows. There are a lot of films they've put out that are very good as well.
There are only a few thousand options on the streaming network, you are correct in pointing out that picking a few recommendations for the user from this list is not differentiating.
For picking what content should be created and added to the streaming network, there are infinite possibilities. Selecting correctly there is very difficult to do reliably. We've all watched movies that made us ask "what the hell were the producers thinking?" Even experienced professionals can do little more than guess what audiences are looking for. When you wonder why a weak movie has 7 sequels, it's because re-using what worked in the past is a very simple risk reduction heuristic that humans are good at applying. With little to go off of beyond past ticket sales, a few test screenings, and personal anecdote, there's little a human can do to improve upon this. You get the occasional genius who has some fundamental understanding of what people like and they regularly make hits, but these people are few and far between, and still they are generally limited to a handful of genres they understand and enjoy enough to work with.
If you had pitched to me an idea for a documentary about a gay redneck roadside zookeeping convicted felon, I would find the idea that any significant amount of people would watch it laughable. No sane person would think of giving this top billing. But Netflix's algorithm spit out that for some arcane reason this would be a hit, and alas now everyone and their mother has watched Tiger King. Such is the power of analyzing tens of billions of viewing experiences in exceptional detail.
Moving beyond this, there is a widely held belief that the key to a strong streaming service is having the best content. Certainly if you are choosing between two movies at the theater you're going to watch the one you think you'll like more. Ditto for if you're flipping through the channels to see which show you want to watch. But streaming isn't the same as going to the movies or flipping through the channels. In those circumstances you have to choose the best of a small number of options that are offered right now; with streaming you watch what you want when you want. This leads to fundamentally different viewing habits. People will binge a season of TV in a weekend, or throw on a movie they've seen 15 times to have on in the background, or will watch a new movie every night for a month, and so forth. Further, the economics of streaming are different. Movies are about getting as many people as possible to pay the price of admission, television is about getting as many people as possible to watch ads, streaming is about maximizing subscription-months. It doesn't matter if 99.9% of a service's offering is crap, if they have 12 releases a year that you want to watch, and they space them out appropriately, you'll remain subscribed. On the other hand, a much anticipated blockbuster that has something for everyone but doesn't have much re-watch value isn't going to get anyone past the free trial period. Success in streaming is all about having the right combination of content being released on the right schedule so that as few users as possible go more than a few weeks without wanting to utilize the platform. When you have millions of users, this is an incredibly difficult instance of combinatorial optimization. This is why, for example, Amazon entered the space and succeeded with ease despite no experience with content creation: online streaming is not a content game, it's a big data game.
Ultimately, all such innovation implosions are a result of a mismatch between the technical challenges perceived by those looking to get into a market and the real technical challenges that actually face those in the market. The old institutions definitely have the resources necessary to reach technical parity, but they squander those resources solving the problems they think are important, not the ones that actually are. At the end of the day, you don't really know what it takes to win until you've won, and even then you may have just gotten lucky somewhere along the way. Success requires the humility to question the validity of our experience.
Ah yes, Tiger King, a well balanced documentary that presents an in-depth look at the practices of murder for hire, and not a lurid tale of entertainment so Netflix can make more money. Popular media, especially shows like CSI and Law and Order, have an incentive to show the rich white folk how resolute the government is, and just how much no one could ever get away with murder. The reality's a bit different, and as recent events have shown, the police aren't above murder anyway. They protect their own and accept murderers in their ranks. So, an ex-cop or current cop is probably the best person to properly incentivize to commit murder.
For them, `p[c] = probability of getting caught` expands to a[c] = probability of getting caught a[b] = probability of there being no repercussions despite getting caught.
But if we're gonna base today's lesson on how to get away with murder on the show Tiger King, the two step lesson it teaches is: 1. own a tiger sanctuary. 2. feed your husband to the tigers for lunch.
They were rivals, it is important to the story that the sanctuary belongs to Baskin:
> Joe Exotic is now serving 22 years for trafficking animals, killing tigers, and plotting to murder his sworn enemy, the big-cat rights activist Carole Baskin.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/0/who-joe-exotic-tiger-king-netflix-documentary-true-story/
> Many reasons, but a key one is that people are now paying for TV directly
This is an insignificant reason. People paid for cable TV and were soon shown ads. Even people who pay to see movies are shown ads before the movie and during movies via product placement. Hulu makes great shows but sells ads more highly targeted than any broadcast channels.
The biggest reason for the current golden age is that streaming services don't have to try to create the most broadly appealing content to fill the most valuable timeslots and can instead cater to each viewer's tastes directly. Breaking Bad was a great show before it got on Netflix, but it wasn't a hit until wide on-demand streaming availability helped it find its audience. Tiger King is the kind of hot garbage that would normally get an afternoon time slot on a second tier cable channel, but making it available on demand turned it into a megahit.
While netflix doesn't have a monopoly on tv shows, they do have a monopoly on a given show. If you want to watch Tiger King, you have to have Netflix.
However even that monopoly falls down once legalities are ignored. In the 90s the only way to watch US shows in the UK was via the internet, so that's what I did. If netflix introduces adverts, then people will use piratebay or whatever to watch it without adverts.
Tangentially: I have a ton of fun trying to figure out various events based on the memes and other references I'm exposed to. The most recent is Tiger King. My best guess at the moment is that he's a guy who went to prison for liking tigers the wrong way.
Surely there's other people who do this or some term for it. I feel like there's a fruitful cultural idea here. Kind of reminds me of how I know most of my dad's childhood TV shows because of the Simpsons.
I saw the first episode of Tiger King, expecting to see some epic, thrilling dramatic series, given all the buzz. I was severely disappointed. Is this really what humans love to watch?