With all of America’s college students online and confined to their bedrooms, viral content has become critical to our cultural psyche. In the era of COVID-19 quarantine, a reluctance to download an app or binge a certain TV show may leave you unable to understand your Twitter feed all week. Given our collective lack of candid conversation, social media has become increasingly important to our everyday functionality — an inability to comprehend its references is simply no longer acceptable. Ultimately, meme culture has proven to be the unifying force that we all needed during this difficult time of solitude.
The most imminent example of this is clearly “Tiger King.” The 7- episode Netflix docuseries was released only a week and a half ago, yet it already feels like an essential cultural artifact.
I heard of the series via a trailer on Netflix when it premiered on the streaming site only a little over a week ago, on March 20. Initially, it looked like the kind of garish reality show that I would typically avoid, and so I promptly ignored it. A few days later, it started popping up as a subject of conversation in various group chats — yet I maintained that I refused to “waste my time” with such frivolous programming. My first mistake was the assumption that I still had something to lose by “wasting time” within our new academic context.
By Friday, my Twitter feed was completely clogged with cultural references to Joe Exotic’s polygamy, the suggestive fate of Carole Baskin’s husband, and a number of other absurdities that hardly make sense within the series’ context, much less without it. Needless to say, I caved.
If you haven’t seen “Tiger King,” there’s truly no easy way to summarize its uniquely bizarre plot. It follows the life of Exotic, a “mulleted, gun-toting polygamist and country western singer” (in Netflix’s own words) and his feud with Baskin, an animal rights activist. But this hardly covers the subplots of cultish behavior, polyamory, hitmen, and suspected murder.
It’s not my traditional taste in entertainment, and yet, after watching the show I feel as though I’m finally plugged into a community that I was previously exiled from.
As of writing this article, Netflix’s daily statistics show that “Tiger King” is their number one streamed TV show. It’s my suspicion that this wouldn’t be the case if our demographic wasn’t all stuck at home, desperately grasping for something that feels engaging and doesn’t involve the phrases ‘COVID-19’ or ‘social distancing.’
With influencers at home, and user-generated quarantine memes losing their novelty, there’s likely to be a dwindling amount of engaging content online. This, in our hyper-connected digital age and during a time when people have more time than ever to scroll through social media, may be a hard pill to swallow. Luckily, “Tiger King” has come at a time when something new and intriguing is more than welcome, and everyone has the time to dive in.
Never before has our culture stood at a standstill, giving us all the time to tap into what’s new. Take it from the hoards of college students now trying to edge their way into what was previously high-schoolers’ digital space on TikTok. With everyone on their screens all day every day, blinking could make the difference between being ‘hip’ with online culture, or being totally alienated from it.
Exotic and his bizarre cohort may just be exactly what we needed to take our minds off of the grim reality happening around us. In such an unprecedented time, it takes a zoo of exotic cat traders to unite us around something that, oddly, feels positive and uplifting in the present moment.