Opinion: Why Tiger King helped us through quarantine

With it being almost a year since Tiger King graced our screens (it was March 20th 2020 can you believe that?) I thought I would try to take a wild guess on why this show was so insanely popular. I remember sitting down and watching it, my mundane routine broken at night when it was time to collectively come together with my family and watch this show, it was oddly addicting, seeing the lives of these crazy zoo owners and the antics that happened in the meantime. 

 It’s hard to tell if this show would have had the same cult following if it hadn’t been released at the height of the stay at home orders. If the magnitude of this wacky show would have hit audiences the same. 

Maybe the reason it was such a massive hit was because we all collectively watched it together. Most shows and movies that everyone recommends to watch you either get to it eventually or you don’t at all. But having absolutely no where to go and seeing what felt like the whole world watching this series, just made you have to turn it on and join the virtual party. Watching this made us feel a part of something huge, which globally I don’t think the world has ever seen. 

The reason I think it stuck was how outlandish it is. You can not predict the course of this show if you even tried.  It has some of the craziest people, you truly think they were characters created in a storyboard room with 12 writers. 

Then there was how people related to the show. The  chaos and unpredictability was like a mirror to our pandemic times as we all felt that first jolt of turmoil to our normal world and we clung on to this show as a life raft to happiness during some people’s darkest periods in their lives.

 It helped us get through the terrible first stage of quarantine and almost a year later (and still not any closer to being out of this worldly mess) maybe some of us will cling to it again. 

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