Nicolas Cage vs. Kate McKinnon: Is there enough Peak TV room for two Joe Exotic scripted series?

The Ringer

Tiger King has become the show of the pandemic. It's still buzzworthy more than a month after its March 20 premiere. Monday's news that Cage will star in a Joe Exotic series, coming months after McKinnon was announced as the star of another Joe Exotic series, begs the question of whether there will still be an appetite for Tiger King-related content after the pandemic is over. "By the time Cage’s and McKinnon’s dueling shows come out—if they come out; development hell is real and hype-ginning announcements can be premature, as anyone who remembers Confederate knows—our immediate crisis will hopefully be past," says Alison Herman. "The final products, then, will be a test of whether the Joe Exotic story will retain its power without a captive audience, or if it’ll be forever tinged by its association with a time of mass societal trauma. My hunch is that a man who once formed a same-sex throuple with two men who previously identified as straight remains interesting no matter the context, as does the world of big-cat breeders, which counts a former drug kingpin as one of its lower-key characters. Still, a fictionalized version of Tiger King’s events won’t be emerging into the same world as its predecessor, even if we don’t know what that world will look like yet. In the meantime, TV’s bottomless need for content has led to its latest potential redundancy. The actual logistics of Peak TV have been interrupted for the foreseeable future, but the underlying conditions are still driving the hunt for entertainment with enough name recognition to break through the noise. As networks and streaming services scramble to stretch their banked series over the coming months, the machine must roll on." ALSO: The makers of "Tiger Safe” emergency kit hires Tiger King's John Findlay to do voiceover for a commercial.