The Potential for a ‘Tiger King Effect’: Analysis of Public and Media Response to the Netflix Series 'Tiger King'

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Netflix aired the docuseries Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness. This aligned with the United States declaring a national emergency and the beginning of stay-at-home orders. Netflixexperienced a significant increase in viewership and a large number of responses to Tiger King’s content from viewers and media outlets (e.g., Stoll 2021). In this article, we present an analysis of social media responses on the Netflix official Facebook page and online news articles associated with Tiger King published between 20 March 2020 and 30 March 2020. This thematic analysis reveals that public response was mainly related to expressions of sentiment, characters featured in the docuseries, and references to the show’s content (e.g., specific scenes). We also identified character references, series content descriptions, and real-life events as themes within media sources. We conclude this article by discussing the potential for a ‘Tiger King Effect’ in the U.S. and the media’s role in distributing human-animal related materials to the general public.